THE USSR ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
5-CLASS
MOVEMENT
The International Working-Class Movement
PROBLEMS
OF HISTORY
AND THEORY
In seven volumes
__TITLE__ The International Working-Class MovementIntroduction by Academician B.N.PONOMAREV
THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION
AND THE INTERNATIONAL
WORKING CLASS
(1917-1923)
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS MOSCOW
Translated from the Russian Designed by Vladimir Yeryomm
THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT
PROBLEMS OF HISTORY AND THEORY
VOLUME 4
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BonpOCH HCTOpHH H TeopHH B C6MH TOMaX
TOM leTBepiHii
BEJIHKHH OKTHBPb
H MEJKftyHAPOflHbia PABO^HH KJ1ACC (1917-1923)
Ha aHrjiHHCKOM H 3 H K e
The Editorial Board:
V. V. Zagladin, Ed.-in-Chief, Y. S. Drabkin, A. A. Iskenderov,
M. P. Kim, K. K. Shirinya
The General Editorial Committee: B.N. Ponomarev, Chairman, T.T. Timofeyev
.
Deputy Chairman O-^^^^jb™***, G.F. Kim, P.N. Fedoseyev A.A. ^Ikn^Y^ y
M.I. Sladkovsky,
A.L. Narochmtsky, \^^-\^, y v. Zagladin, I Y.B. Smeral, V.M. Vodolagm, V.V. Volsky, v.v . g
|
© HsAaieJiMTBO "Mucab , 1980 English translation © Progress Publishers 1984 Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
0302030102-244 ^ M "~014(01)-84
Go-chairmen of the team of authors:
V.V. Zagladin, Professor Y.S.jDrabkin, D.Sc. (Hist.)
CONTENTS
Contributors:
Y.S.^Drabkin, D.Sc. (Hist.) V.Z. Drobizhev, D.Sc. (Hist.) E.G. Gimpelson, D.Sc. (Hist.)
- - ' ---- r*-----»»„„, TTCI
Y.N. Rozaliev, D.Sc. (Econ.)
S.S. Salychev,
D.Sc.
(Hist.)
Preface
'11 Part I
A RADICAL TURN IN MANKIND'S FATE
23Chapter 1. The Working Class Comes to Power
25 The Russian Proletariat
25 Lenin's Plan for Development of the Revolution
30 The Peaceful Period of the Revolution
40 Problems of the Approach and Transition to the Socialist Revolution
51 Steering for an Armed Uprising
60Chapter 2. Victory of the Revolution
72 The Proletariat Takes Power
72 The Triumphal March of Soviet Power
75 Building the Workers' and Peasants' State
83 The First Revolutionary Reforms in the Economy
100 The Soviet Republic's Fight for Peace
106 The Plan for Building Socialism
115 Aggravation of Civil War
123Chapter 3.
The Post-October Revolutionary Upsurge 137
K.K. Shirinya,
D.Sc. (Hist.)
jvaiiuyn. ,
^ ^ Zagladin, Professor
Individual chapters
M.A. Birman, Cand.Sc. (Hist.)
M D Ereshchenko, Cand.Sc. (Hist.)
FJ. Firsov, D.Sc. (Hist.)
V.I. Glunin, D.Sc. (Hist.)
I.V. Grigorieva, D.Sc. (Hist.)
R M Kaplanov, Cand.Sc. (Hist.)
V.M.' Sodkovsky, Cand.Sc. (Hist.)
were
V.L.
A.A.
L.I.
K.F.
A.P.
L.N.
Y.A.
S.P.
T.A. A.L. P.P.
D.Sc
written by: Malkov, D.Sc. (Hist.) Matyugin, D.Sc. (Hist.) Minaev, D.Sc. (Hist.) Miziano, D.Sc. (Hist-) .. Moskalenko, Cand.Sc. (Hist.) Nezhinsky, D.Sc. (Hist.) Polyakov, Corr. Mem. USSR A.b.
Pozharskaya, D.Sc. (Hist.)
Salycheva, Cand.Sc. (Hist.) Semenov, Cand.Sc. (Hist.) Topekha, D.Sc. (Hist.) (Hist.)
.D. Kolpakov. I D.Sc. (Hist.)
y
.... Kurkov, Cand.Sc. (Hist.) T.L. Labutina, Cand.Sc. (Hist.) Y.A. Lvunin, D.Sc.(Hist.)
A.A. Yazkova,
The volume is devoted to a radical turning point in the destiny of mankind, the beginning ol the new era of world history ushered in by the Great October Revolution. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the revolutionary upsurge of 1917-1923, the new stage of the international working-class movement and the emergence of the first socialist state, the revolutions in Central Europe, the clash between revolutionary and social-reformist trends, development of the strategy and tactics and organisation of the communist movement, including problems of a united working-class front and national liberation movement. The role of V.I. Lenin, the greatest theoretician and leader of the world proletariat, and the international significance of Leninism are given due prominence.
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
International Repercussions of the October Revolution
137 The Workers' Revolution in Finland
147A New Stage in the Anti-War and Social Struggle in Capitalist Countries
152 The Russian Experience and Social Democracy in Other Countries
170 The Maturing of the Revolutionary Crisis in Europe
183Chapter 4. Revolution and Counter-Revolution
191 The November Revolution in Germany
191 The Austrian Revolution
208 The Hungarian Soviet Republic
215 The Struggle in Central and Southeastern Europe
224 The Social Battles in Western Europe and the USA
235Chapter 5. The Two Lines in the International Working-Class Movement
254 The Demarcation of Revolutionaries from Reformists
254 The Founding of the Communist International
263 The Confrontation of Revolutionary and Reformist Ideologies
279 The Lessons of the Revolutionary Upsurge
-295 Part II
THE BROADENING OF THE WORLD PROLETARIAT'S
FRONT OF STRUGGLE
301Chapter 6. Defence of the Republic of Soviets
303 Against Interventionists and Whiteguards
303War Communism 318
The Ruling Class
328The "Hands Off Russia" Movement * 343
Chapter 7. The Revolutionary Vanguard and the Masses
358 The Change in the Alignment of Forces in the Labour Movement
358Lenin on Winning the Majority and the Infantile Disease of ``Left-Wing'' Communism
373 The Principles of Communist Strategy, Tactics and Organisation
388Reformists' International Activity 403
Chapter 8. The Working Class and the National Liberation Movement
418 The Comintern and the National and Colonial Question
418 The Class Battles of the Latin American Proletariat
433 Asian Workers and the Fight for National Liberation
441 The Working People of Africa Against Colonialism
461 Part III
THE WORKING CLASS IN THE NEW CONDITIONS
471Chapter 9. The Transition from Attack to Siege
473 Soviet Russia and Peaceful Coexistence
473 The Search for a New Economic Policy
481 The Economic Crisis and Struggle in Capitalist Countries
503 Consolidation of Communist Parties
513The Fight Against the ``Left'' Danger 525
10CONTENTS
The Communists' Watchword: "To the Masses!''
534Chapter 10. Problems oi United Actions by the Proletariat
554 Capital's Offensive and the Danger of Fascism
554 The Tactics of the Workers' United Front
568 The Conference of the Three Internationals
574 The Idea of a Workers' and a Workers' and Peasants' Government
588Chapter 11. The Formation of the USSR. Revolutionary Battles in Europe
607Restoration of the Economy and the Unification of the Soviet Republics
607Lenin on the World Revolution and the Building of Socialism in the USSR
625 The Revolutionary Crisis of 1923 in Germany
636 The Anti-Fascist Uprising in Bulgaria
647 The Strike Struggle in Poland
654 The Anti-Imperialist Revolution in Ireland
661 The Working-Class Movement in Decline
664 International Proletarian Solidarity
679Chapter 12 (Conclusion). The International Role of Leninism
689 Lenin and the World Revolutionary Process
689 Social Contradictions in the Epoch Since October 1917
698 At the Centre of the Battle of Ideas
710 Name Index
PREFACE
The period covered by this volume of The International WorkingClass Movement is one of special significance in the history of mankind, and above all in the history of the world labour movement.
This volume deals with years in which events of a truly epochal character took place. The victory of the October 1917 Socialist Revolution in Russia led to the establishment of a new social system. It opened a period of revolutionary upsurge that swept Europe and other continents. The impact of the October Revolution, needless to say, was not limited to the years 1917 to 1923; it continues now as well. But it was then that, with the personal involvement of V. I. Lenin, decisive changes began which in many ways determined the direction and character of subsequent developments.
In the three preceding volumes of this work, we have shown what complicated paths the development of the working class took, how it was transformed from a "class in itself" into a "class for itself" and became an active and menacing opponent of capitalism, and how it prepared to fight for socialism.
The revolutionary nature of the proletariat had already been clearly displayed in the middle of the 19th century, but it was not yet then capable of acting as the determinant force of social progress. Then the very first steps were taken toward uniting the labour movement and scientific socialism. In no country of the world was there a revolutionary party of the working class that proclaimed its aim to be the fight for socialism; and the international ties of the various national contingents of the proletariat were only being forged.
At the end of the 19th century the basic contradiction of capitalism---labour vs capital---became sharper. The bourgeoisie by coming out against the proletariat, and striving to unite all the reactionary forces of the old world (including its old opponents, the feudal class) against the working class, thereby demonstrated the limits of its historical possibilities. From being the motor of social progress, it became the brake.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the proletariat was already not only showing its inherent revolutionary character but was also staking a serious claim to the leading role in society, the role of builder and leader of the future, new social organism, socialism.
12PREFACE
PREFACE
13``The army of the international proletariat is taking shape," Engels wrote in 1894, "and the approaching new century will lead it to
victory.''^^1^^
In the period from the end of the 19th century to the outbreak of World War I, the working class increased in numbers by roughly 100 to 150 per cent in the advanced countries (Great Britain, Germany,
and the USA).
In 1914 the international proletariat already numbered more than 90 million. The proportion of its core---the industrial workers---had grown. Although the war reduced the numbers of the working class to some extent in the belligerent countries, especially in those that were the theatre of operations, the proletariat continued to increase in numbers, especially in the USA, Canada, and Great Britain. The size of the working class had also begun to grow rapidly in most of the other countries of Europe and the Americas, and in Japan, as the industrial revolution was completed. The forming of a working class was also accelerated in backward countries, including
the colonies.
The main point, however, was not the size of the proletariat, but the fact that its level of organisation had greatly altered by the beginning of the 20th century. Its trade union organisations, formed earlier, had become a powerful weapon in its fight for better working and living conditions (especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries and Scandinavia, and later in other countries). Their total membership in 1914 was more than 15 million. The unions continued to grow during the war years, and in 1918 already had nearly 21 million members. The formation in all capitalist countries of independent political parties of the proletariat that proclaimed the fight for socialism their aim was even more significant. By the outbreak of World War I, 27 Socialist, Social-Democratic and Labour parties, with4,200,000 members, belonged to the Second International. More than ten million voters had supported their candidates at the polls, or two or three times as many as at the end of the 19th century, and the number of representatives elected (in the 14 countries where labour parties took part in parliamentary elections) had reached 650.
The development of the labour movement, and above all of proletarian political parties, however, was very complicated and contradictory. At the turn of the century they had suffered an onslaught of opportunism that sank its roots into all the main parties of the Second International in the years following. The deep connection between imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, and opportunism in the labour movement was disclosed by Lenin. The main thing
~^^1^^ Friedrich Engels, "Grussadresse an die Sozialisten Siziliens", In Marx/ Engels, Werke, Bd. 22, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1963, S. 477.
about opportunism, he stressed, was the substitution of class collaboration for class struggle, i.e. "an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat".^^1^^ The fact that "imperialist ideology also penetrates the working class"^^2^^ was seen with special force at the outbreak of the world war, when opportunism became social-jingoism: "The alliance with bourgeoisie used to be ideological and secret. It is now public and unseemly. Social-chauvinism draws its strength from nowhere else but this alliance with the bourgeoisie and the General Staffs.''^^3^^ The leaders' betrayal demoralised and demobilised the working class, and prevented it from discovering and exploiting its potentialities in an antiwar class struggle.
By unleashing a world war for redivision of the world and spheres of influence, the bourgeoisie reckoned that the working class, weakened by opportunism, would be unable to frustrate its designs and come out as a resolute opponent of the war. It hoped, moreover, that the war itself could help it get a tighter grip on the working class and suppress its revolutionary aspirations. Although the leaders of the Second International went over to the capitalists, the latter's calculations, however, ultimately came unstuck: the war postponed the revolutionary explosions but did not prevent them; on the contrary, it intensified the impending storm.
The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), founded by Lenin, resolutely resisted the policy of the ruling class and the line of the opportunists. It was in fact a party of a new type that integrally combined Marxism and the labour movement and was ready to lead the proletariat's revolutionary struggle to abolish the exploiter system and build a new society. Right from the beginning of the world conflict it came out for turning it from an imperialist war into a revolutionary, civil war. Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered that, though opportunism was doing great harm to the labour movement, it had not abolished or suppressed it, that the war would inevitably provoke a new upsurge of its struggle, and that the workers would inevitably begin revolutionary battle for their vital interests.
This boundless faith of Lenin's and Leninists' in the forces of the working class, which then evoked ironic comments from the rightwing leaders of Social-Democracy, was confirmed by events. That was to be expected, since Lenin based his analysis on the study of the
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Collapse of the Second International", Collected Works, Vol. 21, 1974, p. 242 (here and hereafter Progress Publishers, Moscow).
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", Collected Works, Vol. 22, 1964, p. 285.
* V.I. Lenin, "Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International", Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 443.
PREFACE
PREFACE
15deep-seated trends of social development, and of the development of the working class and labour movement. He made the very important conclusion that the system of imperialism was on the whole ripe for the socialist revolution, and that the international labour movement had reached the degree of maturity at which it could begin to carry out its great historic mission.
The imperialist war accelerated internationalisation of the proletariat's conditions of existence and struggle. At the same time, by drawing into its orbit countries that were at different stages of social, economic, and political evolution, it had made the army of the international proletariat more diverse and multiform, the tasks of revolutionary reforms broader and more all-embracing, the relation of national and international factors much more complex and contradictory. The unevenness of the growth of revolutionary activity in the different countries and regions, could not stop the revolutionising of the masses, though, in some cases, it retarded it.
The way events developed in the war years provided the objective preconditions for rise of a revolutionary situation and its growth into a revolutionary crisis. The war exacerbated all the contradictions of capitalism to the limit, having converted monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, increased exploitation and social contrasts, and put socialism on the order paper. The death of millions of people, the lowering of the working people's standard of living (by 48 per cent in Germany; by 20 to 25 per cent in France; by 17 to 23 per cent in Great Britain; and by 10 to 15 per cent in Italy and Japan), and the considerable increase in political oppression by the ruling classes all provoked growing resistance by proletarians. They began to turn away from the opportunist leaders who had betrayed their interests. The influence of left, internationalist groups was greatly strengthened in Social-Democracy and the trade unions. The masses of Russia were especially rapidly revolutionised. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, basing themselves on the conclusion that victory of the revolution was possible in the new situation at first in one country, taken separately (about which we spoke in the preceding volume), intensively prepared the Russian proletariat and its allies for a decisive struggle against tsarism and the domination of landowners and capitalists, and for the revolutionary dictatorship of
the proletariat.
The right-wing Social-Democrats, the centrists, and even some Left Social-Democrats declared this stand of Lenin's a sort of Utopia. Considering that only the West was capable of laying the road to socialism, they said, first of all, that Russia was still not ripe for socialist revolution, that the Russian proletariat was too small in numbers com pared with the vast mass of the peasantry, and not sufficiently educated, and therefore could not win, let alone build, the
new society. But it was these statements of Lenin's opponents in Russia and Europe that proved Utopian and, moreover, reactionarily Utopian. Because the Russian proletariat, although it was weaker in numbers than the Western, and behind it in level of education, nonetheless had unsurpassed political experience, and relied on the revolutionary traditions of 1905-1907 when it had demonstrated its capacity to lead the peasant masses. And, most important, it had a militant, tempered revolutionary organisation, Lenin's party, ready and capable of leading it in the decisive battle.
The Paris Commune of 1871 had opened a new stage in the fight of the working class, the stage of preparation to storm the old world. The October 1917 Socialist revolution in Russia triumphantly stormed it. Although it took place initially in one country, the revolution in itself was an event of international importance. Elimination of the dominance of feudal landowners and capitalists in Russia signified that the world working class had begun in practice to overthrow the last social system based on private ownership of the means of production. The proletariat of Russia, which was the first to rise and achieve victory, also began to cope with the next task, viz, the building of a new, socialist society, which would develop later into communist society.
The October Revolution thereby demonstrated in reality that the international working class had reached the stage of maturity when it had become capable in practice of taking the fate of society into its own hands and leading it along hitherto unknown roads of socialist construction. As a result, a second epoch-making step was taken compared with the Paris Commune, a gigantic stride forward in the world development of socialism. Although that stride was extremely difficult and cost the working class of Russia nq few sacrifices, it brilliantly confirmed the basic conclusion of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the proletariat's world historic mission. Lenin wrote: "Human history these days is making a momentous and most difficult turn, a turn, one might say without the least exaggeration, of immense significance for the emancipation of the world.''^^1^^
The victory of the Socialist Revolution became the main event of the 20th century because it radically altered the course of history. It did not simply open the next stage in the development of society; it raised the most important issues of the socio-political and economic struggle in the whole world to a qualitatively new level. Leonid Brezhnev said in his report "The Great October and Progress of Mankind": "Understandably, the problems solved by the October Revolution were primarily Russia's problems, posed by its history, by the concrete conditions existing in it. But basically, these were
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Chief Task of Our Day", Collected W^rks. Vol. 27, p. 159.
PREFACE
not local but general problems, posed before the whole of mankind by social development. The epochal significance of the October Revolution lies precisely in the fact that it opened the road to the solution ] of these problems and thereby to the creation of a new type of civili- :
sation on earth.''^^1^^
From that angle, the authors of this fourth volume, drawn from the Institutes of World History, History of the USSR, and the International Labour Movement of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and from the Institutes of Marxism-Leninism and Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the CPSU, have striven primarily to show that the October Revolution, besides being a new era in world history, opened a new stage in the development of the international labour movement. This refers both to the problems of its history and to matters of theory, since the revolutionary transformation of the world begun in November 1917 (October according to the old calendar; hence the name, the October Revolution) created a new situation for the international working class's struggle for its immediate and ultimate goals. Our team started from the point that the picture of the world in that period cannot be reproduced by a simple description of the events that took place following the October Revolution in various regions and countries, although the panorama of these events itself is broad and majestic. Penetration of their substance, and disclosure of the main trends calls for a multidimensional analysis, and allowance for all the comlexities of the interactions and interconnections. In analysing the important social phenomena and processes Marxism always proceeds from the principle of historicism in combination with the concept of their world-wide impact. But this concept is itself historical and dynamic. The October Revolution, as the first act of the international, world revolution, gave this concept an unprecedentedly rich, real content. The concept of world-wide impact, probably for the first time, began not only to embrace and link together concrete phenomena taking place in the most remote corners of our planet, but also to draw into itself elements of the social and political creative activity both of nations traditionally in the van of progress and of backward and small ones. It was all the more important, avoiding cliches and simplifications and with due account for the diversity of the later world revolutionary development, to bring out and stress the general patterns inherent in it. The guiding thread in our work on this volume has been the idea of Marx and Lenin that scientific study of history calls for an integrated approach, wherein history is viewed "as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws".~^^2^^
~^^1^^ L.I. Brezhnev, Our Course: Peace and Socialism, Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1978, p. 171.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Karl Marx", Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 57.
PREFACE
17Without anticipating the exposition of the main events, we would draw the reader's attention to their periodisation proposed in this volume. In the first part of the volume we examine the turn in human history that embraces the preparation and victory of the Socialist Revolution in Russia, the revolutionary upsurge throughout the world connected with its direct impact, the [fierce fight of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in Central Europe (Germany, Austria, and Hungary), the social battles in other regions in 1918-1919, and (as the first result of the revolutionary battles) the struggle of two lines in the international labour movement.
In the second part we deal with the broadening of the front of the world proletariat's struggle. The heroic fight of the Soviet people led by the working class and its Party to defend the revolution against the onslaught of internal counter-revolution and foreign intervention, is shown side by side with the building of the Soviet state, the beginning of socialist reforms, the policy of War Communism, and the role of international proletarian solidarity in consolidating Soviet power. The communist movement in capitalist countries, overcoming what Lenin called the infantile disorder of ``leftism'', moved from forming the revolutionary vanguard to winning to its side the masses, moulded the principles of its own national and international strategy, tactics, and organisation, and fought the reformists. The upsurge of the national liberation movement in dependent and colonial countries created powerful reserves for a broad anti-imperialist front.
The ebbing of the revolutionary wave beginning in 1921, which is reviewed in Part III, called for a search for new forms and methods of proletarian struggle. Passing over to peaceful construction, Soviet Russia was able to consolidate its international position, while the New Economic Policy promoted movement toward socialism. The communist movement fought to win the support of the masses of the proletariat and its allies and tackled the complicated problems of organising united actions of the proletariat against reaction and fascism, taking into account the diversity of national conditions, and of overcoming the counteraction of reformists. In this part, as in the others, great attention is paid to the role of Lenin, the founder of the world's first socialist state, whose ideas had a great impact on the strategics and tactics of the world proletariat. The volume concludes with an analysis of the international significance of Leninism.
Among the problems we have deemed it necessary to go into more or less fully drawing on concrete historical material, are the following, which we suggest are the most important ones.
(I) As a result of the October Revolution the working class of Russia became, for the first time in history, the dominant, ruling class. This faced it with problems that the proletariat had never
18PREFACE
PREFACE
19before had to cope with. The socialist revolution ploughed the soil to a depth never before penetrated by social revolutions. It drew the whole mass of the working class and other working people, the majority of the people, into the process of historical creation. That resulted in the radical and thorough character of the social transformations begun. Their main aims were clearly denned already in the early years of Soviet government, in spite of the enormous difficulties that then had to be overcome: viz., the creation of social production to improve the working man's well-being in every way possible, and provision of the conditions for all-round development of the individual and a general rise in culture.
In those very complicated circumstances, the Russian working class not only fulfilled its international duty as the pathfinder and vanguard of the world army of the proletariat, but also, displaying prodigious heroism and self-sacrifice, drew workers of other countries who found themselves in Russia at the time, and the oppressed peoples of the near and remote periphery into the revolutionary process. From the very first days of the revolution, the working class and its government appeared before the nations plunged into imperialist war as the standard-bearer of peace. The Soviet working class, fighting in capitalist encirclement, defended the sovereignty of the Soviet Republic. In the fierce struggle it relied on the support and sympathy of the international proletariat, and turned its country into the forepost and base of the liberation struggle of the working people across the world. Therefore, both the activity of the working class itself and the entire constructive work of the socialist state it set up are integrally linked with the international labour movement by unity of aim and community of struggle against imperialism. Any attempt on any pretext to disrupt or weaken this international interdependence serves the enemies of progress and socialism.
(2) Victory of the revolution substantially strengthened the position of the international working class giving it new levers of revolutionary transformation. Hitherto the proletariat had waged its struggle against the bourgeoisie wielding power, and had been in a very unfavourable position vis-a-vis it. Capital dominated all continents, and held the instruments and means of asserting and maintaining domination hallowed by centuries of tradition. The proletariat was not only an exploited class but was also humiliated and impoverished materially and spiritually. Now the balance of power between the main class antagonists had been altered in the proletariat's
favour.
First of all, the monopoly of capitalist rule had been broken. All attempts to restore it by military, economic, political, and ideological means failed thanks to the solidarity struggle of the international proletariat which derived confidence in the success of its own strug-
IB from the victories of the Soviet Republic. It was the first time that the international actions of the working people had acquired such an immense sweep. Proletarian internationalism became not onlv a slogan and theoretical principle, but also an active source of strength for all the national contingents of the working class and other working people. It was not just on the international arena, however, that the successes of the land of socialism, and later of the world socialist system as well, began to have an impact, but also, to a great degree, within each capitalist country. Every advance of socialism in the sphere of the economy, politics, and culture opened up new, broader opportunities for the working class of capitalist countries to defend its vital interests and to attack the positions of imperialism. Today's social and political gains of the workers in capitalist countries, and the national emancipation of the peoples of dependent and colonial countries, would have been inconceivable if there had not been the Soviet Union, which smashed fascism and is effectively defending peace and security.
(3) During the post-1917 revolutionary upswing, an ideological shift and a certain change took place in the psychology of the international working class, associated with the rise of its revolutionary vanguard's class consciousness. The October Revolution, despite the difficulties attendant on it, already in the early years graphically demonstrated the proletariat's capacity for independent, historical creativity, its capacity for building a society without exploiters and parasites living on other people. It thereby struck a blow not only at the dogmas of bourgeois ideology, which proclaimed the capitalist system to be unshakeable, but also at the ideas of liberal-democratic reformism, which exploited the masses' force of habit and the belief of the oppressed in the strength of the old world, and preached reconciliation with social inequality for a long time in anticipation of humankind's self-perfection.
The 1917 Revolution struck a blow at reformist Social-Democracy and opportunism which clung to the scheme that socialism was only possible in countries which reached a high level of economic development, where the working class constituted the majority of the population, was trained and disciplined by capitalism, and prepared to govern the state and manage production. This conception not only closed the road to socialism to semi-developed and weakly developed countries, but condemned the workers of advanced countries as well to reformist passivity, calling on them not to resort to destructive revolutionary methods of struggle, since capitalism itself, it was claimed, was gradually civilising itself; when the working class had become sufficiently educated and learned to use democratic rights, it would then, by virtue of its numbers, become the most influential force in society.
2*
PREFACE
21helm stood Lenin, was also natural and necessary. Subsequently, as we know, when the situation in the world changed and there was no longer any need for a centralised international organisation of communist parties, the Comintern was dissolved.
Soviet Russia's experience and example inspired the advanced part of the working class in European countries to turn away from reformist theory and practice, to emancipate itself from the influence of the right-wing and centrist leadership of Social-Democracy, and to take an active part in revolutionary actions. Social-Democracy's almost complete dominance in the labour movement---both in the parties and in the trade unions---was broken. A process of ideological and organisational demarcation of Communists and SocialDemocrats, the two main streams in the world labour movement, developed in acute forms.
Under the counteroffensive of the bourgeoisie, the inception of fascism, the growing danger of a new war, and the decline in the revolutionary activity of the masses that began, there was a need for united, co-ordinated actions of the various contingents of the working class and other strata of the working people. Lenin and the Communist International initiated a policy of a united workers' front, putting forward the idea of a workers' and worker-peasant governments, a united anti-imperialist front in the national liberation struggle of the oppressed peoples, and a unity of all currents of the revolutionary movement. Although the reformist leaders' resistance to this line was not overcome in the early 1920s, the foundations were then laid of a policy that subsequently played a very important role in the anti-fascist struggle of the internatonal working class, the creation of a world system of socialism, emancipation from colonialism, and the later struggle for peace, democracy and socialism.
(5) With victory of the October Revolution the mounting role of the subjective factor in the revolutionary struggle became obvious. For the first time a new society and state were not growing spontaneously, but were being built by the conscious constructive activity of millions of people led by the party of Bolsheviks. The founder of this party, and at the same time the architect of the new epoch, the man who theoretically substantiated and politically ensured the preparations for and carrying through of the first victorious socialist revolution, and the building of socialism, was Vladimir Lenin. A vivid political portrait of him was drawn in Leonid Brezhnev's report at the 50th anniversary celebration of the October Revolution: "Vladimir Lenin has entered history as the founder of the Bolshevik Party, as the great leader and organiser of the working masses and as a scientist of genius. He was a revolutionary in the loftiest and most noble sense of the word. His whole life was one of unremitting struggle for the happiness and interests of the working people.
These theories of class peace were blown sky high by the experience of the imperialist world war. The events of 1917 convincingly demonstrated that the ruling classes would not voluntarily yield power, that only socialism, and not capitalism, could radically solve the problems the working people had been fighting over for decades. As Boris Ponomarev remarked in the introduction to this study, the October Revolution was the first one in man's history "to grant the working class and nations not only formal political rights but also the material conditions required to enjoy them".^^1^^
Before 1917 the revolutionary consciousness of the international proletariat had been moulded mainly by a feeling of protest against capitalist oppression and exploitation, while socialist convictions had been formed mainly by Social-Democratic propaganda and Marxist literature. Now socialism had been converted from an abstract ideal into a reality, and was increasingly becoming an influential factor in the world revolutionary process and international relations. The example of the October Revolution taught the world labour movement much, demonstrating practical ways of overthrowing the domination of capital, and disclosing the need to spare no effort to defend the power won. It was an example of the quest and accomplishments in the as yet unprecedented business of building new society and new state on the ruins of the old system. The labour movement in each separate country has amassed its own experience, of course, and has no need at all to copy the experience of another country. But much of what was first discovered by the October Revolution has since, in spite of a substantial difference in conditions, been repeated in the main by other socialist revolutions and merits recognition as international experience of general significance.
(4) Ever since the Social-Democratic Parties and the Second International passed, first covertly and then overtly, to reformist and chauvinistic positions the labour movement on a worldscale and in the overwhelming majority of countries had no organised revolutionary vanguard. The October Revolution demonstrated with special force the important role of a revolutionary party in a revolutionary period, a party steeled in battle and firmly linked with the masses. The first months of the post-October upsurge in Europe had already indicated that the groups of revolutionary internationalists existing in them were still unable, despite the heroism they displayed, to guide the maturing or beginning revolutions. The founding of communist parties everywhere became a vital need of the labour movement. In the same way, the formation of an international centre of the revolutionary movement, the Communist International, at whose
~^^1^^ The International Working-Class Movement. Problems of History and Theory, Vol. I, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980, p. 18.
22PREFACE
``Moreover, the leader of the Revolution is incomparable as a strategist of revolution and unsurpassed in political tactics. He intuitively sensed every change in the alignment of political forces and in the mood of the masses and knew how to translate this mood exactly into the language of high-level politics, put forward the most effective mass slogan in the given situation and chart the surest way to the objective.
``He was irreconcilable with regard to questions of principle in ideology and politics. But this never hindered him from displaying maximum flexibility in the approach to specific problems. An ardent revolutionary, he mercilessly ridiculed pseudo-revolutionary phrasemongering. A born fighter, he could when necessary agree to compromise and retreat in order to muster forces and then take the offensive more successfully.
``By his nature he could not tolerate anything smacking of bigotry or dogmatism. His creative approach to theory and politics enabled him comprehensively to develop and enrich the Marxist teaching of revolution and the science of building socialism. Despite being immersed in day-to-day work, in a host of urgent affairs, he mapped out the general line for socialist construction in Russia and laid down the principles underlying Soviet domestic and foreign policy.
``Both as a statesman and as a person Lenin was an extraordinarily modest man. The leader of the world proletariat, the man whom the Revolution placed at the helm of the world's first state of workers and peasants was exceedingly exacting to himself, with absolutely no play-acting or vanity.
``Lenin was 47 when from the rostrum of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets he proclaimed the triumph of the socialist revolution. He was 54 when his heart stopped beating. But death was helpless before the greatness of Lenin's genius.''^^1^^
In 1980 the whole world marked the 110th anniversary of Lenin's birth. And as always on the days of outstanding revolutionary anniversaries, the progressive forces of the modern world not only rendered due tribute to the remarkable work of the greatest revolutionary, theorist and practical leader of socialist construction, but also summed up the results of the road followed by mankind under his banner. These results demonstrate with new force the inexhaustibility of Lenin's ideas and the invigorating power of MarxismLeninism, which was displayed for the first time with such gigantic force in the Socialist Revolution of 1917.
Part I
A RADICAL TURN IN MANKIND'S FATE
~^^1^^ L.I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, pp. 14-15.
Chapter 1 THE WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT
While Russia was a country of an average level of capitalist development, it differed from the other imperialist powers primarily in combining elements of monopoly and state-monopoly capitalism with extremely backward, semi-patriarchal relations on the land. Russian reality, Lenin said, was most profoundly distinguished by the contradiction of "the most backward system of landownership' and the most ignorant peasantry on the one hand, and the most advanced industrial and finance capitalism on the other.''^^1^^ Because of the intertwining of old and most modern forms of oppression the masses of the working people in town and country suffered under a double yoke, to which Marx had already drawn attention in Capital: not only the development of capitalist production, but also the incompleteness of that development.^^2^^
In level of industrial production Russia lagged far behind France, Great Britain, Germany, and the USA. But in degree of monopolisation of a number of industries it yielded pride of place only toGermany and the USA. In 1913 around 200 monopolies dominated Russia's economy.^^3^^ More than 80 types of production and marketing of major products were in the hands of amalgamations like Prodamet, Gvozd, Produgol, Prodvagon, Krovlya, Prodarud, etc.^^4^^ The number of monopolies increased by 897 new stock companies during World War I. Around 2 million workers were employed in more than 5,000 war plants.^^5^^ Russia was ahead of all the countries of Europe as regards concentration of banks: the seven biggest banks held 52 percent of the total banking capital.^^6^^ "The number of large shareholdersis insignificant," Lenin wrote in May 1917, "but the role they play, like the wealth they possess, is tremendous. It may safely be said that if one were to draw up a list of the live or even three thousand'
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Political Notes", Collected Works, Vol. 13, 1972, p. 442.
~^^2^^ See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, 1974, p. 20.
~^^3^^ I.I. Mints, The History of Great October, Vol. I, Moscow, 1977, p. 34 (in' Russian).
~^^4^^ A.L. Sidorov, "The Economic Prerequisites of the Socialist Revolution, in Russia", Istoriya SSSR, 1957, No 4, p. 27 (in Russian).
~^^5^^ L.S. Gaponenko, The Working Class of Russia in 1917, Moscow, 1970,, p. 94 (in Russian).
~^^6^^ A.L. Sidorov, op. cit., p. 23.
26CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
27(or perhaps even one thousand) of Russia's wealthiest men, or if one were to trace ... all the threads and ties of their finance capital, their banking connections, there would be revealed the whole complexus of capitalist domination, the vast body of wealth amassed at the expense of the labour of others.''^^1^^
Another feature of Russian imperialism was its dependence on foreign capital which dominated several most important industries: Franco-Belgian in the iron and steel and coal industries of South Russia, British in the oil industry, German in electrical ^engineering. On the eve of World War I the weight of foreign capital in these industries was 52 per cent, and its overall average share was around one-third.^^2^^ The available raw materials and cheap labour gave foreign monopolies exceptional opportunities to make enormous
profits in Russia.
In 1917 Russia remained a predominantly agrarian country. Its total population on the eve of the war was 159,200,000, of which 18 per cent lived in towns and 82 per cent in the country.^^3^^ Wageearners numbered 18,500,000 in 1917. Of them, industrial workers, the core of the Russian proletariat, numbered 3,545,000. Another 1,265,000 (including white-collar workers) were employed in transport, 1,250,000 in building, and 4,500,000 in agriculture.
In spite of its comparatively small numbers, the proletariat, however, was a significant social and political force, incomparably greater than the millions of the scattered masses of the peasantry. This was due in the main to the high concentration of the working class in the country's vital centres and in big enterprises. In the capital, Petrograd, and its suburbs, there were 546,100 workers, 392,800 of them factory workers, around two-thirds of these engineering workers. Around 80 per cent were employed, moreover, in enterprises with more than 500 workers. 24,449 were employed in the Putilov Works, 19,046 in Trubochny, 15,338 in Treugolnik, 10,600 in Obukhovo, and 10,200 in the Okhta Works.
In Moscow there were between 410,000 and 420,000 workers, more than 200,000 of whom were factory workers. Over a third were textile workers, and a quarter engineering workers. The concentration in big enterprises was lower than in Petrograd, Moscow did not have giant works. But all the same there were 28 enterprises with more than 1,000 workers, including the Trekhgorny Textile Mills with •6,000 workers, the Danilov Textile with 5,700, the Gujon Steelworks with 3,300, the Dynamo Electrical Engineering Works with more
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Inevitable Catastrophe and Extravagant Promises", Collected Works, Vol. 24, 1974, p. 428.
~^^2^^ A.L. Sidorov, op. cit., p. 24.
~^^3^^ The National Economy of the USSR in 1978. Statistical Yearbook, Moscow,
-1979, p. 7. (in Russian).
than 3,000, and theMichelson Engineering Works with around 2,000. More than 54 per cent of the workers were employed in 73 enterprises •with more than 500 workers each. There were also many big enterprises outside Moscow in the Moscow Province (more than 220,000 factory workers), and in the 12 adjoining regions that made up the Central Industrial Area, with centres like Tula (where the Arsenal employed 25,000 workers), Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Shuya, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, and Nizhny Novgorod (around 20,000 workers were employed in the Sormovo Engineering Works there). All in all, there were not less than a million industrial workers in this area. Together with the Petrograd Province it produced up to 40 per cent of all the industrial output of Russia, and up to half of the proletariat employed in big enterprises was concentrated in it.
In the Urals miners played the leading role among the 357,000 workers. In the Ukraine the industrial proletariat numbered 893,000, with around two-thirds of them concentrated in the Donets and Krivoi Rog Basins. There were also considerable contingents of the working class in the Baltic provinces, Poland, and the Transcaucasia. The oil-fields of Baku and its province alone had around 60,000 workers. On the whole 72.35 per cent of the proletariat in 31 regions of European Russia was employed in enterprises with more than 500 workers. In the other regions---Siberia, the Far East, Turkestan, and the Caucasus---the total numbers of the factory proletariat were small, but there were quite important industrial centres.
The Russian working class was not uniform socially. The majority were first-generation newcomers from the peasantry in origin, the minority second-generation. Because of the peculiarities of land tenure many workers retained not only family connections but also economic ties with the peasant milieu. On the one hand that retarded development of the class consciousness natural to the hereditary core of the proletariat. But on the other hand these ties helped draw very broad masses of the rural poor into the joint revolutionary struggle. Understanding of the community of interests of the workers and peasants spread increasingly both in the army and in the rear during the imperialist world war; in the rear migrants from the country filled the gaps created in industry by mobilisation for the front. The ratio of men and women in industry altered during the war approximately from 70 : 30 to 60 : 40. In the textile mills the number of women increased by 16.7 per cent, and of teenagers by 34.4 per cent.
In Russia there was still no effective legislation to protect the workers' interests. The working day was longer than in the countries of Western Europe. Earnings were lower and miserly; at the end of the war real wages were not more on the average than half the prewar figure. The overwhelming majority of the proletariat lived in conditions humiliating to human dignity. The rural labourers
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
29suffered from lack of land, lack of horses, the arbitrariness of landowners, and merciless oppression by tight-fisted employer farmers (kulaks), and moneylending shopkeepers. All that, taken together, promoted an accumulation of dissatisfaction with and resentment
against the existing system.
The core of the advanced workers who consciously took the road of revolutionary struggle consisted of the skilled workers of the big industrial enterprises (around 40 per cent of the working class), who. lived in comparatively more tolerable conditions and were fighting not just for an extra crust of bread for themselves and their families but also for social justice for the working people and against lack of rights, against oppression and the tyranny of the powers that be.
The bourgeoisie, afraid of the revolutionary workers, could not become the standard-bearer of the democratic struggle and extend its influence to any signicant fraction of the labour movement. The unresolved agrarian problem, the ruin of the peasantry, the brutal national oppression of the non-Russian peoples, which had made Russia a prison of nations, all had a great impact on the whole socio-political situation and psychological climate.
For those reasons the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat, the peasant revolution, and the national liberation movement merged into a common struggle against tsarism, the main enemy of all the working people. Russia became the weak link in the chain of imperialism because its specific economic and political development exposed the deep contradictions inherent in the stage of imperialism more vividly than in other countries. These contradictions, gathered into a single knot, were aggravated to the limit by the world war, which brought the peoples of Russia particularly great distress and
privations.
During the first Russian revolution the Russian working class had already outdistanced the other contingents of the international proletariat in political development, not only displaying a high level of revolutionary courage and audacity, but also acquiring experience of political leadership of the non-proletarian masses. Then, as Lenin wrote, the fact that "our bourgeoisie is utterly unstable and counterrevolutionary" had been demonstrated, as well as the capacity of the proletariat to be "the leader of a victorious revolution", and the readiness "of the democratic masses of the peasantry to help the proletariat to make this revolution victorious".^^1^^
From then on the Russian proletariat had continued to consolidate its position as leader of the revolutionary masses, fighting tsarism even in the hardest times of retreat of the revolution and triumph of reaction. With the outbreak of the world war both the bourgeoisie ~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The 'Leftward Swing' of the Bourgeoisie and the Tasks of the Proletariat", Collected Works, Vol. 15, 1982, p. 400.
and broad strata of the peasantry were seized by chauvinistic moods. Only the working class proved to be immune to chauvinism to a considerable extent. And in that sense, too, it showed itself to be the most advanced contingent of the international proletariat. The tsarist authorities were therefore less able than the governments of other countries to exploit the war to reduce the fighting capacity of the workers, who not only continued to fight in the difficult situation of war time but intensified their struggle. Evidence of this is the scale of the strike struggle in three of the belligerent countries (Russia, Germany, and France), as will be seen from the table:
Table 1
Numbers of Strikers (in thousands)
Year
Russia
Germany
France
1915 1916
539 1,086
14 1299 41
Source: The World War in Figures, Moscow-Leningrad, 1934, p. 88 (in Russian),
The fact that labour aristocracy in the ranks of the Russian proletariat was small also helped this situation. Opportunism and reformism^were common among the intelligentsia and the petty bourgeoisie, but were much weaker among the politically active workers.
The complete separation of the revolutionary Social-Democrats, the Bolsheviks, from opportunist elements had been prepared by the whole history of the labour movement. The Party of Bolsheviks was the main force that trained the fighting qualities of the Russian proletariat. Its concern for ideological clarity had brought down many imprecations on the Bolsheviks for limiting "free thinking". But it became clear in the war years that the European SocialDemocratic Parties' ignoring ideological work had encouraged infection of considerable strata of the working class with jingoism. The Bolsheviks' attacks on chauvinistic intoxication, on the contrary, were evidence both of their personal courage and of the superiority of a party whose ideological and political independence enabled it to go against the stream and to rescue the banner of revolutionary Social-Democracy.
The Party of Bolsheviks was also prepared organisationally to wage the revolutionary struggle in the difficult situation created by the war. It had great experience of parliamentary and other forms of legal struggle. At the same time it had always paid great attention to forms of activity that trained the masses for the most resolute
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
31revolutionary actions. The Party's years of painstaking work to» prepare the Russian proletariat ideologically, politically, and organisationally for bold, selfless struggle against the autocracy bore its fruit in the days of February 1917 (early March, according to the European calendar, later adopted in Russia).
LENIN'S PLAN FOR DEVELOPMENT OF THE REVOLUTION
The February Revolution immediately went beyond the limits of the normal bourgeois revolution. The Romanov monarchy, which had celebrated its 300th anniversary a few years before, was swept aside by the onslaught of the masses. And because of the revolutionary energy, consciousness, and organisation of the proletariat, that happened in one swift action.
The essential feature of the February Revolution, which made it unusual and drove it further than all previous revolutions (with the exception only of the Paris Commune), was the fact that the masses' revolutionary initiative created agencies of a new, revolutionary power, Councils (Soviets, the Russian name for them, later to become internationalised) of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies in the capital and throughout the country. The dual power that took shape at the centre and in localities was unique intertwining of twodictatorships---the power of the bourgeois Provisional Government, and the power of the Soviets which in essence was the revolutionary, democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
The bourgeoisie only succeeded in partially seizing political power. While the people's fight against the autocracy was still only developing, disagreements arose among the various groups of the bourgeoisie. But when it became clear that it was impossible to preserve the monarchy, these disagreements receded into the background before their common desire to limit the scope of the revolution, to curb the revolutionary storm and steer it into the framework of customary legality. The Provisional Government headed by Prince G. E. Lvov included the main bourgeois leaders. The Constitutional-Democratic Party (the Cadets) was represented by P. N. Milyukov, the October 17th Union (the Octobrists) by A. I. Guchkov. The millionaire sugar manufacturer M.I. Tereshchenko became Minister of Finance. Only the post of Minister of Justice was entrusted to A. F. Kerensky, leader of the peasant Trudoviks Group (who soon switched to the party of Socialist-Revolutionaries).
The political programme proclaimed by the bourgeois leaders was so conservative that it looked like a direct challenge to the masses who had made the revolution. The main party of the bourgeoisie, the
Cadets, which soon changed its name to the People's Freedom Party, did not respond to the national demand for peace, but came out for continuing the war "till victory". The reactionary bourgeois camp numbered 27 Russian and national parties in 1917.^^1^^ The Russian capitalist class, like the imperialist circles of the Entente that supported it, hoped that the revolutionary fervour which had gripped the masses might help raise the fighting efficiency of the Russian armies, as had happened in revolutionary France at the end of the 18th century. But the situation was different and the popular masseswere different.
A considerable part of the millions of the petty-bourgeois masses,, it is true, who had been roused to action but were not experienced in politics, believed that the war had become a defensive, revolutionary one for Russia after the fall of the autocracy. But this wave of "revolutionary defencism" was short-lived and did not develop intoreadiness to continue the annexationist imperialist war.
The bourgeois parties did not intend to tackle the agrarian problem. Instead of confiscating the manorial estates and handing the land over to the peasants, they only promised later to alienate ownership of lands their owners did not farm, on condition that the government and peasants paid them 6 or 7 billion roubles in compensation.2 The Cadets upheld the tsarist principle of a "single and indivisible Russia" which implied a policy of suppressing the national liberation movement of the oppressed nations. They went no further than a promise to allow the non-Russian nationalities economic and cultural autonomy. The Provisional Government, having promised to convene a Constitutional Assembly, did not hurry to define when and how the elections would be held. Capitalist historians have often expressed regret since at the shortsighted policy of the Russian bourgeoisie. The American historian Merle Fainsod, for example, wrote: "If the Provisional Government had been able to withdraw from the war and carry through a land settlement satisfactory to the peasantry, it is highly doubtful that the Bolsheviks could have gathered enough support to stage a successful coup d'etat.''^^3^^ And an opponent of the Bolsheviks from the leftist camp observed:
``All the more ironic was it that in 1917 none of the bourgeois parties, not even the moderate Socialists, dared to sanction the agrarian revolution which was developing spontaneously, with elemental force, for the peasants were seizing the aristocracy's land long before the Bolshevik insurrection. Terrified by the dangers that threatened
~^^1^^ L.M. Spirin,J TAe Collapse of Landowners' and Capitalist Parties in Russia, Moscow, 1977, p. 293 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 244.
~^^8^^ Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass., 1963, p. 85.
CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
33property in town, the bourgeois parties refused to undermine
property in the country.''^^1^^
The policy of the Russian bourgeoisie really was shortsighted, but not by chance, and not because of a subjective mistake of one leader or another. The reactionary nature of their views and their fear of the "elemental force" of the people, especially of the proletariat, were historically due both to the onset of the epoch of the general collapse of capitalism and the acuteness of the class contradictions in Russia. In other words the bourgeoisie proved incapable of tackling the objectively maturing tasks facing society, and was only concerned with how to cling to power.
The situation of dual power, naturally, could only be temporary. Either the Soviets, relying on a considerable part of the army and the armed people for support, would have to take on the carrying through of revolutionary changes, or the Provisional Government, which initially was unable to use force against the people, would have to find means of suppressing the Soviets and establishing the unchallenged power of the capitalist class.
The leading role in the political army of the democratic revolution was played by the proletariat led by the Party of Bolsheviks. The February Revolution, which confirmed the correctness of the Bolshevik slogans, was the beginning of the state where the imperialist war was to be converted into a civil war. In Petrograd and other centres the Bolsheviks put in tremendous work to organise and rally the proletariat, above all in works and factories. They began to mould a political army of the socialist revolution, and prepared the workers for various forms of struggle, including armed struggle. The Party worked actively in the army, and strove to penetrate deeply into the thick of the peasant masses. Its branches operated in very •difficult circumstances throughout the country. During the revolution the Bolsheviks were in the forefront of the mass struggle, but they did not have sufficient strength to bring the whole tempestuous revolutionary stream under their influence.
The petty-bourgeois parties of the Mensheviks and SocialistRevolutionaries (SR), their leaders spouting slogans of democracy consonant with the mood of the broad masses as yet politically inexperienced, were on the crest of the upsurge. At the time, pettybourgeois parties---Menshevik Social-Democratic, Populist, Anarchist, etc., plus those of the various nationalities---numbered 23 (L. M. Spirin. op. cit., p. 293).'Menshevik N. S. Ghkheidze was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and Menshevik M. I. Skobelev, and Trudoviks' leader Kerensky became his vice-chairmen. These leaders were able to ~^^1^^ Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution, Russia 1917-1967, Oxford U.P., London, 1967, p. 23.
persuade the Soviet, against the warnings of the Bolsheviks, to hand over power voluntarily to the bourgeois Provisional Government. Mensheviks and SRs succeeded in heading the Soviets in many other cities as well.
In the Menshevik Party, which kept the name Russian SocialDemocratic Labour Party, the right-centrist leaders F. I. Dan, I. G. Tsereteli, and N. S. Chkheidze enjoyed most influence. While adopting a chauvinist position, after the February Revolution they came out in words for both socialism and peace and democracy. The real essence of the party's policy, which had 193,000 members in August 1917,* was more frankly expressed by Georgi Plekhanov, then on its right wing: "Russian history has not yet ground the flour from which the wheaten cake of socialism will be baked .... Until it has ground such flour the participation of the bourgeoisie in public administration is necessary in the interests of the whole country, and consequently in the interests of the working people themselves.''^^3^^
The Socialist-Revolutionary Party came out after the Revolution with a broad democratic programme promising a republic and freedoms of every sort. While rejecting class struggle, it laid claim to the role of representative of the "united working people", primarily the peasantry. Acting in the spirit of neopopulist^ideas it promised socialisation of the land based on equal distribution. It soon had more than 500,000 members. Formally, around a million members were registered in the party (L. M. Spirin. op. cit., pp. 301, 303).
For all the differences in their programmes, the Mensheviks and SRs were united by the petty-bourgeois basis of their policy. While at the head of the Soviets and not believing in the potential of the Russian proletariat, they strove in every way to strengthen the position of the Provisional Government, and to build support for it among the masses. While claiming the role of a third force between the Cadets and the Bolsheviks, they adopted a wavering, vacillating position on all the main issues of the revolution, and in practice inclined more and more to direct collaboration with the bourgeoisie. The popular masses above all demanded ending the war and the conclusion of peace. The Mensheviks and SRs publicly declared that they did not support the bourgeoisie's programme of war till victory and came out for peace without annexations and reparations; at the same time, however, they advocated continuation of the war against Germany in the name of "defence of the Revolution against the external enemy". The workers introduced the 8-hour day in the factories without prior permission. Meanwhile, the Mensheviks proposed waiting for a legislative solution of this issue. The peasants were demanding immediate agrarian reforms and were beginning to occupy ma-
~^^1^^ L.M. Spirin, op. cit., pp. 300-301.
~^^2^^ Edinstvo, 20 June 1917 (3 July new style). 3-1323
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
35democratic, revolution in Russia is completed".i The rise of dual power was evidence that the revolution "has gone farther than the ordinary bourgeois-democratic revolution, but has not yet reached a `pure' dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry".^^2^^
He saw the main task of the revolutionary party and the working class as "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"^^3^^. That approach followed from his theory of the socialist revolution and his conclusion that it could be triumphant initially in one country. The slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" required systematic and patient explanation to the masses that only a government of the Soviets would be really revolutionary. It was necessary to convince the masses from their own experience of the correctness of the Bolsheviks' policy and the fallacy of the line of the conciliatory parties, which were holding back development of the revolution. Since the Provisional Government could not stop being imperialist, it was to be refused any support. But Lenin's most important conclusion, new in principle, was "not a parliamentary republic---to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers' Deputies would be a retrograde step---but a republic of Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers' and Peasants' Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom"^^4^^. History had not yet known such a republic.
The February Revolution confirmed that the centre of the world revolutionary movement had shifted to Russia. The Russian working class moved to the vanguard of the international struggle, and this laid additional obligations and responsibilities on it. In that connection Lenin wrote: "There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is---working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one's own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle... in every country without exception."5 The working class of Russia therefore had to push the revolution forward to the maximum in order to do its international duty successfully.
Lenin's new directive, setting the aim of developing the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution into a socialist one, presumed a further con-
^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Letters on Tactics", Collected Works, Vol. 24, 1974, p. 44.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", Collected: Works, Vol. 24, p. 61.
~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 22.
~^^4^^ Ibid., p. 23.
~^^5^^ Ibid., p. 75.
norial estates on their own initiative, but the SR Party opposed such actions, considering that only the Constituent Assembly could sanction land reform. On the national question neither the Mensheviks nor the SRs went any further than "cultural-national autonomy", postponing this issue, too, to the Constituent Assembly. Such a line primarily benefited the capitalist class, which was trying to gain time in order to consolidate its power and master the situation.
In the conditions building up, the fate of the revolution depended to a decisive extent on the position of the Bolshevik party. It had profoundly analysed the lessons of the 1905 Revolution and had rich experience of leading the revolutionary masses. Right from the start it supported the Soviets, and expressed distrust of the Provisional Government. But the situation that came about after the February Revolution demanded a new orientation, a new strategic plan and new tactics. The Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, endeavouring to consolidate the Soviets, did not then wholly understand the situation. The absence of Lenin, who was in far-off Switzerland, had
its effect.
Learning of the outbreak of the revolution in Russia, Lenin immediately stressed that this was only its first stage, which "will not be the last, nor will it be only Russian".^^1^^ He pointed out that the Provisional Government could not give the people peace, or bread, or liberty, and oriented the Party on passing from the first stage of the revolution to the second by consolidating and developing the role, significance, and strength of the Soviets. His main message was: "Workers, you have performed miracles of proletarian heroism ...in the civil war against tsarism. You must perform miracles of organisation, organisation of the proletariat and of the whole people, to prepare the way for your victory in the second stage of the revolution.''^^2^^
Lenin returned to Russia on 3 (16) April 1917, after 9 years of emigration. In a historic speech from an armoured car at the Finland Station of Petrograd, he greeted the workers and soldiers who had laid the foundations of a social revolution on an international scale. The next day he was already presenting a report, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", which contained a profound analysis of the situation. In his "April Theses" and later speeches and articles, he outlined a plan of action for the revolutionary party of the proletariat, and defined the strategic aim and the tactics necessary to
achieve it.
Lenin clearly appreciated the character of the shifts taking place.
To the extent that power had passed from the landed aristocracy to
the capitalist class, "to this extent the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-
* V.I. Lenin, "To Alexandra Kollontai, March 16, 1917", Collected Works,
Vol. 35, 1976, p. 295.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Letters from Afar", Collected Works, Vol. 23,1964, pp. 306-307.
3*
CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
37vergence and intertwining of the democratic and socialist goals as it developed, with the former subordinated to the latter. There appeared prospects of carrying out the democratic tasks of the revolution, unresolved in its bourgeois stage, in the course of a socialist revolution. It was clear from the outset that this coming together of democracy and socialism was only possible given two essential conditions, namely: (1) consistent dissociation of the proletarian line from the petty-bourgeois, conciliatory one; and at the same time (2) winning over the broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. the peasantry, to the side of the proletariat, above all the poor peasants without whom it was inconceivable altogether to establish proletarian power and advance to socialism. In the new stage of the revolution a new balance of class forces also had to be developed. As Lenin had already established in 1905, the proletariat and the poorest peasantry could become the driving forces of the socialist revolution; the inevitable wavering and vacillations of the middle peasantry necessarily had to be overcome by neutralising it.
Lenin considered it necessary to amend the Party's Programme in the light of the new tasks, to change its name, and to set up a new, revolutionary International free of chauvinism and centrism.
His plan was widely discussed at the Petrograd city and 7th (April) All-Russia conferences of the RSDLP(B), and in the press. Lenin had to carry on a sharp polemic both with those who, referring to the Bolsheviks' old formulas, were against the policy towards the socialist revolution, and with ``leftist'' critics. In this debate he refined and developed his views, including those on the relation between democracy and socialism, as the revolution developed.
In his discussion with L. B. Kamenev Lenin stressed the need to reckon with the specific situation that had taken shape, and showed the depreciation of the old formula that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not accomplished until the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry is established, bourgeois democracy has exhausted its possibilities, the agrarian question has been resolved, and so on. Kamenev's position on co-operation with the petty-bourgeois parties followed from this premise. In opposition to it Lenin stressed that the revolution had already created the Soviets--->new type of state, similar to the Paris Commune, a higher type which was superior in its democracy to any parliamentary bourgeois republic and which opened the road to socialism.1 The Soviets, having become a state authority, would! more fully ensure independence of the masses, and would "more effectively, more practically and more correctly decide what steps can
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, op. cit., p. 68.
jje taken toward socialism and how these steps should be taken".1 Lenin regarded criticism of the mistakes of the petty-bourgeois parties in the obtaining conditions as "most practical revolutionary work", because there were no other means of "advancing a revolution that has come to a standstill, that has choked itself with phrases, and that keeps 'marking time', not because of external obstacles, not because of violence of the bourgeoisie, ... but because of the unreasoning trust of the people". Only daily explanatory work could "really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the mass in general, as well as their bold and determined initiative in the localities----the independent realisation, development and consolidation of liberties, democracy, and the principle of people's ownership of all the land.''^^2^^ That was the real road leading to the full and undivided power of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and other deputies.3 Lenin stressed the heed to concentrate all efforts on the fight for influence within the Soviets, the organisations of the majority of the people, on educating the masses, and raising their class consciousness, and he warned, the Party of the danger of sinking into subjectivism and losing touch with the people. He came out against attempts to "skip over" the unresolved tasks and resolutely dissociated himself from Blanquist adventurism and any kind of playing at "seizing power". The error of Trotsky's ``leftist'' formula "No tsar, but a workers' government" lay in just such a Blanquist approach.^^4^^
When A. I. Rykov said it was impossible to count on the sympathy of the masses for the socialist revolution in petty-bourgeois Russia, and that the impetus toward it must come from the West, Lenin replied: "Nobody can say who will begin it and who will end it. That is not Marxism; it is a parody of Marxism. Marx said that France would begin it and Germany would finish it. But the Russian proletariat has achieved more than anybody else. ... We must not lapse into reformism.''^^5^^
The April Conference, and, before long, the whole Party, too, understood the political line Lenin developed after an in-depth analysis of the new conditions created by the revolution. When substantiating the orientation on socialist revolution, Lenin proceeded from his earlier analysis of imperialism and the world war unleashed by it. He considered the problem of the maturity of the conditions
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Letters on Tactics", op. cit., p. 53.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", op. cit.. p. 63.
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "Political Parties in Russia and the Tasks of the Proletariat", Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 98.
~^^4^^ V.I. Lenin, "Letters on Tactics", op. cit., pp. 48, 49.
~^^5^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. (B.)", Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 246.
WORKING CLASS GOMES TO POWER
39for a socialist revolution to be above all an international issue, and not just a national one. "From the point of view of Marxism," he said at the conference, "in discussing imperialism it is absurd to restrict oneself to conditions in one country only, since all capitalist countries are closely bound together. Now, in time of war, this bond has grown immeasurably stronger.''
The conference resolution on the current situation, drafted by Lenin, therefore, began with a description of the position of "world capitalism". It said: "The objective conditions for a socialist revolution, which undoubtedly existed even before the war in the more developed and advanced countries, have been ripening with tremendous rapidity as a result of the war. The concentration and internationalisation of capital are making gigantic strides; monopoly capitalism is developing into state-monopoly capitalism.''
This trend, Lenin noted, could have two directly contrary consequences. With maintenance of private ownership of the means of production it would lead to an intensification of exploitation, oppression, reaction, military despotism, a growth of capitalists' profits, etc. "But with private ownership of the means of production abolished and state power passing completely to the proletariat, these very conditions are a pledge of success for society's transformation that will do away with the exploitation of man by man and ensure the well-being of everyone.''^^1^^
In the draft of the Party's amended programme that he made in April-May 1917, the international revolutionary outlook was depicted still more graphically. Imperialism and the war transformed "the present stage of capitalist development into an era of proletarian socialist revolution". The fact that "that era has dawned" meant that the revolution and its triumph were inevitable, yet the struggle would be difficult: "Only a proletarian socialist revolution can lead humanity out of the impasse which imperialism and imperialist wars have created. Whatever difficulties the revolution may have to encounter, whatever possible temporary setbacks or waves of counterrevolution it may have to contend with, the final victory of the proletariat is inevitable." The character of the impending epoch determined the working class's strategic task: "Objective conditions make it the urgent task of the day to prepare the proletariat in every way for the conquest of political power in order to carry out the economic and political measures which are the sum and substance of the socialist revolution.''^^2^^
In elaborating on the international factor in the development of the revolution, Lenin also analysed the role of Russia in the world
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference...", Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 238, 309, 310.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Materials Relating to the Revision of tin Party Programme",
Collected Works Vol. 24, p. 460.
revolutionary process in accordance with his concept of the link between the proletariat's national and international tasks: "The great honour of beginning the revolution," he said at the opening of the Conference, "has fallen to the Russian proletariat." Needless to say, "the proletariat of Russia cannot aim at immediately putting into effect socialist changes. But it would be a grave error, and in effect even a complete desertion to the bourgeoisie, to infer from this that the working class must support the bourgeoisie, or that it must keep its activities within limits acceptable to the petty bourgeoisie, or that the proletariat must renounce its leading role in the matter of explaining to the people the urgency of taking a number of practical steps towards socialism for which the time is now ripe.''^^1^^
But was Russia capable of being the first to take the socialist road? Both the international authorities of Social-Democracy and the Russian pillars of the capitalist class, of the Socialist-- Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, were unanimous in answering in the negative: in view of its backwardness Russia was not ripe for socialism, it was too early to introduce socialism there, that was a bourgeois revolution and would remain so, and the Bolsheviks who were trying to push it further, were hopeless ``adventurers'', ``Blanquists'', `` terrorists'', or even worse.
In general, Lenin replied, socialism could not be ``introduced'' in any way, and what was necessary were those transitional revolutionary measures that had matured in practice, that were both economically and technically feasible and would be "steps toward socialism". These measures included "nationalisation of the land, of all the banks and capitalist syndicates, or, at least, the immediate establishment of the control of the Soviets of Workers' Deputies."2 The resolution of the April Conference spoke of centralisation and nationalisation of the banks, insurance companies, and major capitalist syndicates (the sugar refineries, Produgol, Prodamet, etc.,), and of general labour conscription under the control of the Soviets. " Extreme circumspection and caution" would be required when implementing these measures, the resolution stressed, i.e. "a solid majority of the population must be won over and this majority must be convinced of the country's practical preparedness for any particular measure. This is the direction in which the class-conscious vanguard of the workers must focus its attention and effort, because it is the bounden duty of these workers to help the peasants find a way out of the present debacle." It is in these last words that Lenin saw the nub
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference...", Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 227, 311.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 73-74.
40CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
41of the whole resolution: approaching socialism not as a leap in the dark but as a practical way out of the existing disruption.
``'This is a bourgeois revolution, it is therefore useless to speak of Socialism,' say our opponents. But we say just the opposite: 'Since the bourgeoisie cannot find a way out of the present situation, the revolution is bound to go on.' ... When all such measures are carried out, Russia will be standing with one foot in socialism.''^^1^^
The Conference also discussed the agrarian and national questions in the context of the line adopted. Nationalisation of the land was characterised as a measure that did not go immediately beyond the bourgeois system but, nevertheless, struck a strong blow at private ownership of the means of production. The class meaning of the demands for nationalisation of all land and confiscation of the manorial estates was brought out in Lenin's report. The fate of the Russian Revolution, the resolution said, depended on whether the urban proletariat would succeed in drawing the rural proletariat and the mass of the rural semi-proletariat after it. The Party called on the peasants to take the land immediately in an organised way, through the Soviets and other bodies, without waiting for the Constituent Assembly. Victory of the socialist revolution also largely depended on whether the working people of the oppressed nations would follow the proletariat. The leftist slogan "down with frontiers" was rejected; the resolution drafted by Lenin recognised the right of all nations to self-determination, free secession, and the formation of independent states, without confusing it with the issue of the desirability of secession.
The April Conference recognised the need to review the Party Programme and include an assessment in it of the new epoch of wars and revolutions and the demand of a Republic of Soviets. A number of out-of-date provisions were to be amended. The Central Committee was empowered to take the initiative in proceeding immediately with the founding of a Third International, which could be built, the resolution said, "only by the worker masses themselves and their revolutionary struggle in their own countries.''^^2^^
The road leading Russia to the socialist revolution was defined.
THE PEACEFUL PERIOD OF THE REVOLUTION
The slogan "All Power to the Soviets!", put forward by the Bolsheviks, did not mean a call to overthrow the Provisional Government, .in, "The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference...", op. cit., pp. 311,
Since the Soviets had struck a bargain with the latter, such a call would have led objectively to a fight against the Soviets as well. Something else was implied, a gradual process which, combiningvarious forms of class struggle, would lead to the desired end. In other words the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" oriented the Party, in the circumstances of the time, on peaceful development of the revolution.
The objective basis for a possible peaceful development of therevolution was that the Provisional Government could not use force. The army had got out of its control, had gone over to the side of thepeople, and was not suitable to suppress the mass action. The police had been dispersed and disarmed during the February fighting. AsLenin said, "the first civil war in Russia has come to an end: we arenow advancing towards the second war---the war between imperialism and the armed people. In this transitional period, as long as thearmed force is in the hands of the soldiers, as long as Milyukov and Guchkov have not yet resorted to violence, this civil war, so far as we are concerned, turns into peaceful, prolonged, and patient class propaganda. ... So long as the government has not started war, our propaganda remains peaceful.''^^1^^
At the same time the popular masses, intoxicated by the successes of the revolution, displayed a "credulous unawareness" and gave thepetty-bourgeois compromising parties the chance to act in their name. But although the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks at the head of the Soviets opposed revolutionary reformsin every way, the system of Soviets itself, with the power of re-election and recall really being implemented, made peaceful transfer of leadership to the revolutionary party possible. If state authority had been fully in their hands, Lenin remarked later, a peaceful path of development "would have been the least painful, and it was therefore necessary to fight for it most energetically".^^2^^
The Bolsheviks' criticism of the compromising policy of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks then did not rule out the possibility of co-operation with them in the interests of the revolution. The slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" itself created favourableconditions not only for joint action of all the parties in them against the Provisional Government, but also for preventing civil war.. As Lenin wrote:
``If there is an absolutely undisputed lesson of the revolution, onefully proved by the facts, it is that only an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, only an immedi-
y ,
308.
~^^2^^ See The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP(B). April
1917, Minutes, Moscow, 1958, p. 255 (in Russian).
O / .
r
* rr
V.I. Lenin, "On Slogans", Collected Works, Vol. 25, 1977, p. 187.
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
43ate transfer of all power to the Soviets would make civil war in
Russia impossible.''^^1^^
Full power could not be transferred to the Provisional Government without using force against the people; bourgeois and SocialDemocratic writers who accuse the Bolsheviks of Blanquism, put.schism, and such like sins, prefer to keep silent about that.
The February Revolution and overthrow of the autocracy led to a movement of the broad masses, and raised them to active, independent involvement in political affairs. "Russia at present is seething," Lenin wrote. "Millions and tens of millions of people, who had been politically dormant for ten years and politically crushed by the terrible oppression of tsarism and by inhuman toil for the landowners and capitalists, have awakened and taken eagerly to politics."2 Popular initiative was displayed in mass meetings, assemblies, discussions, and demonstrations. It was not ``anarchy'', as the bourgeoisie described it, but the political freedom won. Spokesmen of the various parties openly defended their programmes and slogans, so that the working people had the chance to compare them. In the -developing struggle for the minds and souls of people it became clear what ideas and what actions most corresponded to the objective sense •of the movement and most fully reflected the radical interests of the
masses themselves.
Lenin and other Bolsheviks often spoke at workers' meetings in Petrograd, At one, in the huge Putilov Works on May 12, he debated with V. M. Chernov, the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and •a minister in the Provisional Government. Chernov argued for continuation of the war, called on the Putilov workers to produce more ;guns for the front, and attacked the Bolsheviks. Then Lenin mounted the platform. An eyewitness described it as follows. "The attention -of everyone present was concentrated on the small figure of Ilyich. Lenin spoke passionately and movingly. He told the workers about the horrors of the imperialist war, talked about the billions of .-superprofits that the capitalists were raking in, getting fat on the world war, and about who this war was benefiting and who needed it." Chernov, Avksentiev, Martov, and other leaders of the pettybourgeois parties, having forgotten the resolution they had moved, hastily quit the works yard to the shouts of the workers: "Down with the Conciliators!", "Down with the War!''^^3^^. Workers who heard
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Russian Revolution and Civil War," Collected Works,
Vol. 26, 1972, p. 36.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", Collected
Works, Vol. 24, p. 61.
~^^3^^ I. Eremeev, "Lenin and the Putilov Workers", The Chronicle of Great -October. April-October 1917, Moscow, 1958, pp. 50-51 (in Russian).
Lenin'^^8^^ speech at the Obukhov Works recalled: "After his speech the tasks facing the revolution became astonishingly clear; the verbal fog in which the speakers of all other parties shrouded the workers and soldiers was blown away.''^^1^^
In those conditions the Bolsheviks had to cope with a twofold task, viz., on the one hand, to encourage development of the masses' revolutionary initiative in every way and, on the other hand, to steer the spontaneous movements into the channel of organised struggle for the people's main demands, for further advance of the revolution toward transfer of power to the proletariat in alliance with the poorest peasants.
The Bolshevik Party itself, after long years underground, had only 24,000 members at the end of February 1917. On gaining legality it began energetically to draw advanced workers into its ranks; at the end of April it already had more than 100,000 members. The organisations in the major industrial cities grew particularly rapidly: in Petrograd from 2,000 to 16,000, in Moscow from 600 to 7,000, in Ekaterinburg from 40 to 1,700. In July the Party had 240,000 members, and in the autumn 350,000. Its nucleus, around 60 per cent, consisted of the advanced, most class-conscious, and staunchest workers.
The Bolshevik Party, the vanguard of the Russian proletariat, saw its primary task as waging a resolute right for socialism against the power of capital. To win that inevitably long and difficult fight, the working class had to show its qualities clearly as leader and guide of all the labouring people of town and country, and of both the centre and the periphery of an immense state. It was only possible to train and develop these qualities through day-by-day struggle, and the Party strove to exploit all the varied forms and organisations created by the revolution so as to penetrate deep into the popular masses.
The main arena where the Bolsheviks developed their struggle to influence the masses was the Soviets, the working people's most authoritative organisations. In the first months of the revolution there were few Bolsheviks in them: less than 2.4 per cent in the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, 22.8 per cent in the Moscow Soviet of Workers' Deputies, 14 per cent in the Kiev Soviet of Workers' Deputies, and 12.8 per cent in the Kharkov Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.^^2^^ But the Bolsheviks' idea of power for the Soviets corresponded to the mood even of those strata of the
~^^1^^ A.A. Antonov, A.S. Gundorov, E.P. Onufriev, "Lenin Addresses the Workers of the Obukhov Works", Lenin in October. Reminiscences, Moscow, 1957, p. 156 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ A.M. Andreev, The Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies on the Eve of the October Revolution. March-October 1917, Moscow, 1967, p. 77 (in Russian).
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
45working people who were not ready to accept the whole Bolshevik programme. Cases became more and more frequent when by decision of Soviets commissioners of the Provisional Government were dismissed and the Soviets took over their functions. That happened in Kronstadt, Riga, Narva, Podolsk, Orekhovo-Zuevo, Ivanovo-- Voznesensk, Kovrov, Krasnoyarsk and settlements in the Urals and the
Donbass.
In the spring and summer, the Soviets could have taken power painlessly throughout the country because the Government could not resist them. The issue of power was raised at the First Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies convened in Petrograd in June. According to the party affiliation of the 777 (of the 1,090) delegates who declared it, more than two-thirds belonged to the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary Parties, or supported them. The Menshevik I. G. Tseieteli, arguing the need for the Soviets to support the Provisional Government, declared that there was no political party in the country that would say "Give us power". "No party can refuse this,~" Lenin retorted, "and our Party certainly does not. It is ready to take over full power at any moment." The transfer of power to the revolutionary proletariat with the support of the poorest peasantry would mean the overcoming of anarchy and disruption, curbing of the capitalists, revolutionary struggle for peace "in the surest and most painless forms ever known to mankind".^^1^^ But the Congress turned down the Bolsheviks' demands both for transfer of all power to the Soviets and for ending the war. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets elected then included 107 Mensheviks, 101 Socialist-Revolutionaries, and 35 Bolsheviks. But each new re-election of Soviets in the localities weakened the position of the conciliatory parties and strengthened the influence of the Bolsheviks. In the Petrograd Soviet, for example, the size of the Bolshevik group quintupled in summer, and in the Kiev Soviet the Bolsheviks got a third of the seats.
The Bolsheviks fought to increase the role and influence of the trade unions. They grew rapidly: in March and April 1917 they had 500,000 members, and in October already more than 3 million. The unions united most of the industrial proletariat (in Petrograd 93.9 per cent of the workers, and in Moscow even more)^^2^^. The metal workers' and textile workers' unions became the biggest and best organised (526,000and 571,000 members respectively).^^3^^ The Mensheviks leading several big trade unions tried to steer their activity onto reformist
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "First All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies", Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 20, 28,
~^^2^^ History of Leningrad Workers, Vol. 2, Leningrad, 1972, p. 24 (in Russian).
~^^3^^ A.G. Egorova, The Party and the Trade Unions in the October Revolution, Moscow, 1970, p. 325 (in Russian).
lines, and insisted on their ``neutrality'' in the political struggle. That became the main reason for the decline in their influence. By the autumn the Bolsheviks had won many of the unions to their side, ^rhich became militant organisations not only acting in defence of the workers' economic interests but also displaying political activity. In March 1917, alongside the Soviets, works committees began to be set up in enterprises. They were new organisations born of the mass revolutionary initiative. They arose out of strike committees, but their functions were much broader. They were elected at works and shop meetings, united all the workers of the enterprise irrespective of the union they belonged to, and had the job of defending their immediate interests. As their everyday function, the works committees intervened actively in the operation of the mill or factory, enforced revolutionary order, controlled the activity of the employers and management, disrupted attempts by capitalists to hold up production, sometimes even took over management of the enterprise. These committees immediately became a firm bastion of the Bolsheviks. Conferences of works committees began to play a significant role in the major proletarian centres. At the First Conference of Works Committees in Petrograd in late May and early June, to which 367 works committees sent delegates, three-quarters of the delegates were in support of Bolsheviks. The conference passed a resolution, moved by Lenin, on measures to fight the economic dislocation, which said that success could only be possible if all state power were transferred to the proletarians and semi-proletarians. A Bolshevik, N. A. Skrypnik, was elected chairman of the Central Council of Works Committees, which became their centre for the whole country.
The movement for workers' control acquired increasing scope. In the summer of 1917 it involved no less than 2,800,000 workers, i.e. three-quarters of the industrial proletariat of Russia. Control was exercised by works committees and control and management commissions. They blocked the attempts by capitalists to close down enterprises in their fight against the revolution, and to create chaos and anarchy in the economy. Worker auditors checked stocks of raw materials and fuel, kept watch on the despatch of machinery and finished goods from enterprises, audited financial operations, looked into matters of wages and sackings, and organised the guarding of the enterprises. The Bolsheviks attached great significance to the fight for workers' control, and called for it to be introduced immediately, even before power was taken. Its importance was not only in curbing the despotism of capitalists and preventing disruption of industry. During the struggle for workers' control and its implementation, the workers themselves gained managerial skills and political experience, their class consciousness rose, and
CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
47"
their revolutionary initiative broadened. The Bolsheviks saw workers' control as an important means of leading the masses in th& struggle for power, since it helped debunk the compromisers, and convinced the workers of the need to put an end to the capitalists'
domination.
In the early days after the February Revolution, when the city police and gendarmes disappeared from the streets, their place was taken by detachments of workers' militia and armed squads of workers. That, too, was a manifestation of creative revolutionary initiative. The Bolsheviks considered peaceful development of the revolution only possible if the workers and revolutionary soldiers were armed, and counter-revolution deprived of armed support. The revolution had to create its own armed forces capable of frustrating any attempt by reaction to settle with the masses.
The Bolsheviks' call to form a proletarian militia had a broad response everywhere. Nizhni Novgorod workers, for example, wrote into the mandate of their representatives on the Soviet of Workers' Deputies that a people's militia was needed so as to implement democratic demands and consolidate the gains: "The armed people can do everything to carry out the working class's programme. An unarmed people will be defeated and again shackled with strong chains."1 In the big works of Petrograd the detachments of the workers' militia numbered several hundred persons each. All the Soviets in which the Bolsheviks had a strong position took an active part in organising a workers' militia. The Executive Committee of the Minsk Soviet of Workers' Deputies, having formed a city workers' militia, elected the Bolshevik M. V. Frunze its chief. In Lugansk the works squads were merged into a city workers' group. Squads of workers' militia were formed by the Soviets in Ivanovo-- Voznesensk, Krasnoyarsk, and in a number of towns in the Urals and the Donbass. The conciliators opposed the organisation of the militia; where they headed Soviets, therefore, the workers often set up
one in spite of them.
Lenin, who followed the formation of the workers'militia closely, considered it was "a measure of tremendous---it will be no exaggeration to say, gigantic and decisive---importance, both practically and in principle. The revolution cannot be made safe, its gains cannot be assured, its further development is impossible, until this measure has become general, until it is carried through all over the country.''^^2^^ In a number of places the workers' militia squads arose under the title Red Guard; later the majority began to
^^1^^ The Revolutionary Movement in Russia after the Overthrow of the Autocracy. Documents and Materials, Moscow, 1957, pp. 558-59 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "A Proletarian Militia", Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 179.
jje called such. Relying on the Red Guard (workers' militia), theworkers guarded enterprises, maintained order in the towns, and saw to proper distribution of foodstuffs. The Soviets enforced their decisions with the help of the Red Guard.
The Bolsheviks paid great attention to work in the army, on whoseposition the fate of the revolution hung. Their winning of the army also meant strengthening of the alliance of workers and the poor peasantry. The Party's military organisation set up in April 1911 guided the political work of army Bolsheviks who brought the programme for peace and solution of the agrarian question to the; soldiers, explained the imperialist character of the Provisional Government's policy, and struggled to democratise the army. One of the organisers of the fighting squads of the 1905-1907 Revolution, N. I. Podvoisky, soon became the leader of the Bolshevik military organisation. Bolshevik branches were set up in frontline and rear units and garrisons. The revolutionary seamen formed a Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet (Centrobalt) and elected a Bolshevik sailor, P. E. Dybenko, its chairman. The Bolsheviks dispelled illusions about "revolutionary defence" and exposed the lies by which the bourgeoisie tried to set the soldiers against the workers. The reports of Lenin, Podvoisky, Krylenko and others at the All-Russia Conference of Front-line and Rear Organisations of the RSDLP(B) held in June in Petrograd were devoted to explaining the Party's policy.
The Party's work in the country was not limited to putting forward a genuinely revolutionary agrarian programme. Party agitators were sent to explain it on the spot and made use of country and provincial peasant congresses. Many of these adopted resolutions in the summer on putting manorial estates and their farm implements at the disposal of volost^^1^^ committees.
The First All-Russia Congress of Peasants' Deputies convened in Petrograd in May 1917, and became a major event. A tense struggle for influence over the peasant masses developed at it between the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had an absolute majority, and the Bolsheviks. In an "Open Letter to the Delegates" and his speech on the agrarian question, Lenin doggedly advised the peasants to take over all the land immediately, in as organised a fashion as. possible, and not permitting damage to property. "Let a decision be taken by the majority," he said, "we want the peasants to obtain the landed estates now, without losing a single month, a single week, or even a single day.''^^2^^ Not without reason one of the Siberian
~^^1^^ A volost was a subdivision of the county (uyezd) division of a province (guberniya).---Translator's note.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "First All-Russia Congress of Peasants' Deputies", Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 492.
48CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
49peasants wrote to the folks back home: "Today I heard the famous Lenin at the Congress, a great mind ... against him the ministers seemed tiny.''^^1^^ In the summer a mass peasant movement swept the Central and North-Western regions, the Volga Area, the Ukraine, and the Baltic area.
In the upsurge of the national liberation movement that developed in the spring and summer of 1917 in non-Russian areas of the former •empire only the Bolsheviks issued a consistently internationalist programme. While striving to bring the nations together, they wanted to do so "not by violence, but exclusively through a free fraternal union" of the workers and all labouring masses. The more •democratic the Soviet Republic would be, Lenin considered, "the more powerful will be the force of voluntary attraction to such a republic on the part of the working people of all nations".^^2^^ On these principles the Bolsheviks condemned the Provisional Government for having got into a conflict with the Finnish Seim and the Ukrainian Central Rada which were demanding autonomy. While exposing bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, the Bolshevik Party •organisations in the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic area, the Transcaucasia, Turkestan, and other regions, strove to rally the working people of the various nationalities, Christians and Muslims, and to win the millions of the peasant poor oppressed by tsarism over to the side of the proletariat.
Dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government's policy grew. Continuation of the war and the actions of the bourgeoisie led to further disorganisation of the economy, inflation, and hunger. The insignificant rise in wages won by stubborn strikes was wiped out by the growth of prices. The masses' hopes and expectations remained unrealised. Indignation was vented more and more often in spontaneous mass actions aimed against the Provisional Government. Lenin saw the spontaneity of the rising movement itself as undoubted proof "that it is deeply rooted in the masses, that its roots are firm.... The proletarian revolution is firmly rooted, the bourgeois counter-revolution is without roots---this is what the
facts prove.''^^3^^
Since spontaneous outbursts were inevitable as the revolution developed, the Bolsheviks deemed it their duty to be together with the struggling masses, directing their actions into organised channels and developing their class consciousness. The Party maintained
~^^1^^ See V.P. Safronov, October in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk, 1962, p. 264 (in
Russian).
~^^2^^ See V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", op. cit.,
p. 73.
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Russian Revolution and Civil War", Collected Works,
Vol. 26, p. 31.
this position, though with varying success, during the three political crises that occurred during the period of dual power.
On 18 April (1 May new style) 1917, Milyukov, the Foreign Minister, sent a note to the governments of Great Britain and France containing an affirmation of the Provisional Government's readiness to wage the war "till victory". The cynical imperialist character of the note evoked a sharp protest from the workers and soldiers, who spontaneously staged an armed demonstration and meeting in front of the Government building, shouting "Down with Milyukov!" The Bolsheviks went along with this movement, trying to direct it onto lines of organised struggle for transfer of all power to the Soviets. The April crisis forced the bourgeoisie to seek a ``socialist'' cover. As a result, a coalition government was formed, consisting of ten Cadets and Octobrists, and six SRs and Mensheviks. This was the same manoeuvra that had already been tested in Western capitalist countries. Its essence, as Lenin put it, was the bourgeoisie's intention to put the leaders of "socialist democracy" into the position of harmless "appendages of a bourgeois government, to shield this government from the people by means of near-- socialist Ministers" who would thus take responsibility for its policy.1 A second political crisis developed in June. On 18 June (1 July) 1917 a half-million-strong peaceful demonstration was held in Petrograd at the graves of victims of the revolution on the Field of Mars. Bolshevik slogans predominated at it: "All Power to the Soviets!", "Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers!", "Neither Separate Peace with the Germans, Nor Secret Agreements with the Anglo-French Capitalists!". The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks tried in vain to counter these by their own slogans. Political demonstrations under the Bolshevik slogans also took place in Moscow, Minsk, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov, Tver, and other cities. This crisis was stopped by the offensive mounted by the Russian army at the battle front. It did not bring the Government down, but it did reveal how tense the class struggle had become, since it passed off with considerable swings of the petty-bourgeois strata toward the revolutionary proletariat.
On 4(17) July there was another half-million demonstration in Petrograd under the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!". On the eve of it soldiers angered by the disbandment of revolutionary units spontaneously took to the streets with slogans of "Down with the Provisional Government!" and "All Power to the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies!". They were joined by the workers of several factories. The Bolsheviks considered the action premature,
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Great Withdrawal", Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 61.
4-1323
WORKING CLASS GOMES TO POWER
51because the crisis had not yet come to a head in the provinces, and especially in the army. While taking part in the demonstration they tried to give it an organised, peaceful character. Lenin, who addressed the demonstrators from the balcony of the Kshesinskaya Mansion, called on them to be restrained, tenacious, and vigilant. In the Taurida Palace, 90 representatives from 54 enterprises moved that the joint session of the Central Executive Committee and the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies should take full power. They declared: "We trust the Soviet but not those the Soviet trusts." The leaders of the Socialist-- Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, however, turned down the masses' demands, declaring the demonstration a "Bolshevik plot". While on the way to the palace the demonstrators had been provocatively fired on by counter-revolutionaries. The streets of the capital ran with the blood of workers and soldiers: 56 persons had been killed and 650 wounded. The Government proclaimed a state of emergency in Petrograd, and troops summoned from the front began to disarm the workers and revolutionary soldiers and sailors. Arrests began, and the office and printing plant of Pravda were smashed up.
Anti-government actions took place as well in Moscow, Kiev, Riga, Orekhovo-Zuevo, Nizhni Novgorod and Krasnoyarsk. The Central Committee of the RSDLP(B) appealed to working people, who had shown their will, to call off the demonstrations. Nevertheless the new coalition government headed by the Socialist-- Revolutionary A. F. Kerensky began repressive measures against the Bolsheviks. On 9(22) July the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies, in which SocialistRevolutionaries and Mensheviks predominated, declared the Provisional Government a "government of salvation of the Revolution" and voted it unlimited powers to fight revolutionary actions.
In the article "Lessons of the Revolution", Lenin described the road taken by the petty-bourgeois parties as follows: "Having once set foot on the ladder of compromise with the bourgeoisie, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks slid irresistibly downwards, to rock bottom. On February 28, in the Petrograd Soviet, they promised conditional support to the bourgeois government. On May 6 they saved it from collapse and allowed themselves to be made its servants and defenders by agreeing to an offensive.... On June 19 they approved the resumption of the predatory war. On July 3 they consented to the summoning of reactionary troopfe, which was the beginning of their complete surrender of power to the Bonapartists. Down the ladder, step by step.
``This shameful finale of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties was not fortuitous but a consequence of the economic
status of the small owners, the petty bourgeoisie, as has been repeatedly borne out by experience in Europe.''^^1^^
The Provisional Government could now, without reckoning with the Soviets and aided and abetted, moreover, by their SocialistRevolutionary cum Menshevik leadership, use armed force against the masses. Dan, one of the Menshevik leaders, frankly declared at a session of the Central Executive Committee: "What Comrade Kerensky called on us to do, we have already done. We are not only ready to support the Provisional Government, we have not only delegated full power to it, we are demanding that it make full use of this power.''^^2^^
The July crisis put an end to dual power in favour of counterrevolution, which took the offensive everywhere. The Soviets were turned into an appendage of the Provisional Government. Peaceful transfer of power to them, which the Bolsheviks had been fighting for, became impossible. It was thus demonstrated once more that the policy of conciliation with the bourgeoisie, unprincipled yielding to it, only weakened the position of the working class, and profited only its class enemy.
PROBLEMS OF THE APPROACH AND TRANSITION TO THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION
On the evening of 5(18) July, 1917, Lenin, barely escaping arrest, had to go underground. While hiding for three months outside Petrograd, out of the thick of the revolutionary events, he kept in very close touch with the Party and guided its activity. In that time he wrote around 50 articles, letters, and pamphlets, including such programmatic works as The State and Revolution, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, and Revision of the Party Programme. In them he substantiated the historical necessity and inevitability of a socialist revolution in Russia, and developed both theoretical and practical political issues of the approach and transition to this revolution.
In August 1917, further analysing the relation between imperialism, war, state-monopoly capitalism and the socialist revolution, Lenin wrote: "The war has speeded up developments fantastically, aggravated the crisis of capitalism to the utmost, and confronted the peoples with making an immediate choice between destruction
42.
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Lessons of the Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 241- Novaya Zhizn, 14(27) July 1917.
4*
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
53and immediate determined strides towards socialism.''^^1^^ Evidence of that was, for example, the introduction of universal labour conscription in Europe and compulsory syndication. A month later Lenin added to this idea that state monopoly was objectively generating an alternative: either a reactionary, bureaucratic state would run production in the interest of the landowners and capitalists, or the revolutionary-democratic state would take charge of it, and then the position would be radically altered, then that "is
a step towards socialism".
In that context Lenin also pictured the socialist system itself in a new way, its general idea that far inevitably remaining abstract among Marxists. He saw it as a new system growing directly out of the old one in concrete, specific conditions created by real imperialism and the world war: "For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.''^^2^^ From this dialectical connection between the old and new qualities Lenin deduced very important proof of the inevitability of a revolutionary outbreak: "There is no middle course here. The objective process of development is such that it is impossible to advance from monopolies (and the war has magnified their number, role and importance tenfold) without advancing towards
socialism.''^^3^^
A result of these reflections was a generalisation in which the economic substantiation reinforced the necessity of political, revolutionary action: "Imperialist war is the eve of socialist revolution. And this not only because the horrors of the war give rise to proletarian revolt---no revolt can bring about socialism unless the economic conditions for socialism are ripe---but because state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs .''^^4^^
That conclusion, needless to say, did not alter, or replace, the root proposition accepted by all revolutionary Marxists that there is a transition period between capitalist and socialist society, or as Marx put it, "the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other". For it was from that proposition that it followed that it was "a political transition period in which the state canlbe
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "From a Publicist's Diary", Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 282.
• V.I. Lenin, "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It", Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 362.
» Ibid.
* Ibid., p. 363.
nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat".* Lenin not only accepted this idea, but was at that time defending and developing it vigorously in a polemic against Kautsky.^^2^^ As is clear from the context, when speaking of the absence of an "intermediate rung" he wanted to stress another point, viz., that imperialism (or state-monopoly capitalism) was so ripe for socialist revolution that there would be no economic barriers to society's entering upon this transition period between capitalism and socialism once the proletariat had taken power; immediate steps in that direction would become possible.
In passing from general, fundamental considerations to the concrete circumstances in Russia, Lenin not only did not underestimate its comparative backwardness but, on the contrary, pointed to its greater backwardness as one of the reasons why the revolution had begun earlier in Russia than in the countries of the West.^^3^^ It is incalculable how much paper the enemies of Lenin and socialism have wasted trying to turn that statement against the Russian Revolution and its leader. A special "doctrine of backwardness" was invented and ascribed to Lenin, that put Russia in the same rank with China, India, and other countries et a pre-capitalist level, so as to prove ``illegitimacy'' of the fight for socialism in Russia, and ``fallacy'' of the whole strategy of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. It has become fashionable even to accuse Lenin of underestimating that in Russia, allegedly, the "asiatic mode of production" predominated.^^4^^ But Lenin always had in mind the relative backwardness of tsarist Russia, stressing that it was a "medium-- developed" (or ``medium-weak'') capitalist country in which a highly concentrated and monopolised industry was the hed-fellow of a grotesquely backward, small-commodity countryside.^^5^^
Russia's comparative backwardness, in Lenin's thought, not only did not rule out the possibility and necessity for it to fight for socialism but on the contrary made it easier to begin the revolution. The point was the "utmost decay of tsarism" which had caused universal hatred of it in all strata of the population, and the lack of economic strength and political experience of the Russian bour-
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme", Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, p. 26.
~^^2^^ See V.I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 459.
~^^8^^ See V.I. Lenin, "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It", op. cit., p. 364.
~^^4^^ See, for example, R. Dutschke, Versuch Lenin auf die Fiisse su stellen. West Berlin, 1974.
~^^6^^ Lenin Miscellany XI, Mosccw-Leningrad, 1929, p. 397 (in Russian); V.I. Lenin, "Political Notes" Collected Wcrks, Vol. 13, p. 442.
54CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMBS TO POWER
55geoisie which depended on government orders and subsidies, truckled to tsarism, and was afraid to look republican even in words. Other factors were the war which had brought Russia military defeat, vast human casualties, loss of territory, economic dislocation, disorganisation of transport, and impending famine.^^1^^ The unresolved character of all the main general democratic tasks in Russia had further revolutionised the peasant and national liberation movements. The mass impact, for all its diversity, was therefore very great. And because there was an organising and guiding force, the revolutionary proletariat and its militant party, the Russian Revolution was a shattering force capable of advancing beyond the overthrow of the autocracy to the establishment of worker and
peasant power.
We must add here that, in Lenin's view, "the war in the past three years has pushed us a good thirty years ahead",^^2^^ and created a quite developed military-governmental industrial complex. But the revolution had pushed the country even further and faster, and "resulted in Russia catching up with the advanced countries in a few months, as far as her political system is concerned". As the experience of those countries demonstrated, it could take decades to make such progress without a revolution. But there remained a harsh problem for Russia: "either perish or overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically as well"^^3^^. The key to a really scientific understanding of the very complicated issue of the preconditions for the socialist revolution in a country lay in this distinguishing between, and at the same time uniting of, the political and economic planes. Lenin had come to the conclusion, even earlier, from study of the disparate and spasmodic development of various countries in the imperialist epoch, that victory of socialism was possible initially in a few countries, or even in one. Now, in the circumstances of the developing Russian Revolution, there were no longer any doubts about what country it could be. The most burning issue, however, demanding an answer, was whether Russia was capable of taking the road of socialist revolution first on the economic plane as well as on the political one. In that case Russia's comparative backwardness would, evidently, not make it easier but, rather, complicate the sweeping revolutionary transformation of society and make it
very difficult.
Lenin analysed this matter thoroughly. Unlike reformists he did not seek justification in the country's relative backwardness for
~^^1^^ See V.I. Lenin, "Th Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It",
op. ctt., p. 368.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "From a Publicist's Diary", op. cit., p. 283.
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It", op. cit.,
p. 368.
rejecting the socialist revolution, or postponing it to the distant future. On the contrary, he considered it the job of revolutionaries to find such forms and methods of advancing to socialism as would correspond to Russia's real conditions. He continued to work along the line already planned in the decisions of the April Conference, viz., seeking the concrete, gradual "steps toward socialism" in a country faced with inexorably advancing economic dislocation.
In the situation of revolutionary tension capitalist circles were deliberately letting the economy go to wrack and ruin, and aggravating the economic chaos by lockouts. P. P. Ryabushinsky, a major Russian monopolist, cynically proclaimed at a commercial and industrial congress in August: "The gaunt hand of famine and people's poverty is needed to grip the throat of the people's false friends, the members of various committees and councils.''^^1^^ And the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who had joined the Government, though seeing the inevitability of the impending catastrophe, nevertheless displayed complete inactivity. Lenin brought out the class sense of that: "Control, supervision and accounting are the prime requisites for combating catastrophe and famine. This is indisputable and universally recognised. And it is just what is not being done from fear of encroaching on the supremacy of the landowners and capitalists, on their immense, fantastic and scandalous profits.''^^2^^
But was there a chance in Russia for "the swiftest and most radical transition to a superior mode of production"? Lenin considered that issue on two planes. On the international plane he thought it positive that "we have before us the experience of a large number of advanced countries, the fruits of their technology and culture. We are receiving moral support from the war protest that is growing in Europe, from the atmosphere of the mounting world-wide workers' revolution". On the domestic plane he noted first of all the favourable political situation: "We are being inspired and encouraged by a revolutionary-democratic freedom which is extremely rare in time of imperialist war.''
The heart of the matter, he thought, was that "it is impossible to stand still in history in general, and in war-time in particular. We must either advance or retreat. It is impossible in twentiethcentury Russia, which has won a republic and democracy in a revolutionary way, to go forward without advancing towards socialism, without taking steps towards it (steps conditioned and determined
~^^1^^ The Economic Situation in Russia on the Eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Documents and Materials (March-October 1917), Part I MoscowLeningrad, 1957, p. 201.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It", op. cit., p. 328.
56CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
57by the level of technology and culture).''^^1^^ But that could not be done without transitional measures toward socialism and "combined types" in the economy of the transitional period.^^2^^
Who could take these necessary steps? Only the Soviets, becoming the really revolutionary-democratic authority, could create "a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way"^^3^^.
And it is with this state structure that the state-monopoly capitalism existing in Russia would be driven inexorably toward socialism. The issue of the development of the revolution into a socialist one was therefore firmly rooted in the question of power, in the question of the character and role of the state.
On the other hand, class stratification, inevitable during any bourgeois revolution, leads to a problem of state power. The united revolutionary democracy had in practice exhausted itself with overthrow of the autocracy. During the next half-year the predominant and governing petty-bourgeois parties of the Socialist-- Revolutionaries and Mensheviks displayed their complete incapacity to tackle the most important issues of the revolution. Only the revolutionary working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, alone exhibited the will to fight for power for itself and its natural allies, the poorest
peasants.
The question of the state moved to the centre of attention from another aspect as well. In the early days of the revolution the Bolsheviks saw the Soviets as the embryo of a state of a new type, suitable both for consistent tackling of general democratic issues, and for taking steps toward socialism. The workers, soldiers and peasants considered the Soviets their agencies. But the advantages of the Republic of Soviets, unprecedented in history, compared with the traditional parliamentary democratic republic, had to be substantiated theoretically on the basis of revolutionary practice.
In that connection Lenin considered it particularly important, in the autumn of 1917, to carry out his old idea of re-establishing the theory of Marxism about the state, distorted by the opportunists, linking it with definition of the proletariat's tasks in the developing revolution. His book The State and Revolution, aimed against opportunism and anarchism, remained unfinished in the hectic time of the eve of the October Revolution. Nevertheless it played an outstanding role in consolidating the revolutionary proletariat's gains.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Impending Catastrophe...", Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 368, 362-63.
z V.I. Lenin, "Revision of the Party Programme", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 172.
~^^8^^ V.I. Lenin. "The Impending Catastrophe...", op. cit., p. 361.
In the revolutionary situation Lenin's attention was, naturally, drawn to developing the views of Marx and Engels on smashing the old state machine in the course of a popular revolution, and on the role of the new proletarian power during the transition from capitalism to socialism. He specially emphasised their dialectical approach to the problem of the relation between bourgeois and proletarian democracy when they analysed the experience of the Paris Commune.
After pointing out such measures of the Commune as the abolition of the standing army, electivity of all officials, and[their replaceability, Lenin summed up as follows: "The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine `only' by fuller democracy.... But as a matter of fact this `only' signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type. This is exactly a case of 'quantity being transformed into quality': democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy.''
Then, adding a fourth measure to the Commune's three, viz.r "the reduction of the remuneration of all servants of the state to the level of workmen's wages", Lenin stressed: "This shows more clearly than anything else the turn from bourgeois to proletarian democracy, from the democracy of the oppressors to that of the oppressed classes, from the state as a 'special force' for the suppression of a particular class to the suppression of the oppressors by the general force of the majority of the people---the workers and the peasants.''^^1^^
When speaking of the electivity and removability of all officials and a ceiling on their payment, Lenin again noted that such measures led to "the interesting boundary line at which consistent democracy, on the one hand, is transformed into socialism and, on the other, demands socialism". Just as the Commune replaced the standing army by the arming of the workers, Lenin saw the people's militia as a factor stimulating the transition to socialism: "Such a degree of democracy implies overstepping the boundaries of bourgeois society and beginning its socialist reorganisation. If really all take part in the administration of the state, capitalism cannot retain its hold.''
The development of democracy, however, does not march forward simply, directly, and smoothly to more and more democracy, and then to socialism, as liberals and opportunists picture it. It is impossible to pass from capitalism to socialism without a quali-
425.1 V.I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 424,
58CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS GOMES TO POWER
59tative leap, without a socialist revolution. All the Commune's measures, Lenin considered, served "as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism", because they united the interests of the workers and the majority of the peasants. They seemed to apply only to "the reorganisation of the state, the purely political reorganisation of society; but, of course, they acquire their full meaning and significance only in connection with the 'expropriation of the expropriators' either being accomplished or in preparation, i.e., with the transformation of capitalist private ownership of the means of production into social ownership.''^^1^^ In another place Lenin pointed out that "to develop democracy to the utmost, to find the forms for this development, to test them by practice, and so forth---all this is one of the component tasks of the struggle for the social revolution. Taken separately, no kind of democracy will bring socialism. But in actual life democracy will never be 'taken separately'; it will be 'taken together' with other things, it will exert its influence on economic life as well, will stimulate its transformation; and in its turn it will be influenced by economic development, and so on. This is the dialectics of living history.''
Taking Marx's idea of the transition period as his starting point, Lenin stressed that development from capitalism to socialism " proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way." Meanwhile, the dictatorship of the proletariat "cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people", the dictatorship of the proletariat would have to enforce "a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists". Their resistance would have to be suppressed, and "there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence".^^2^^
But the substance of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not just coercion of the exploiters. In order to cope with its constructive tasks it needs maximum initiative and activity of the masses in the management of the state and the economy. The building of socialism is a business of enormous difficulty, even though capitalism, by creating large-scale, centralised production and management, has made the organisation of accounting and control accessible to the majority of the educated population. Wrote Lenin: "Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question. It is a Utopia. But to smash the old bureaucracy machine
at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy ... is the direct and immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat." Supervisors and bookkeepers, technicians of all sorts, kinds, and degrees should forfeit their position of a privileged caste, and be turned into responsible, replaceable, modestly paid employees.^^1^^
Continuing that idea in other works of this same time Lenin wrote that the main difficulty of the proletarian revolution was to exercise the most precise accounting and control on a national scale, workers' control over the production and distribution of goods. Explaining why the Bolsheviks put the slogan of workers* control always alongside the dictatorship of the proletariat, and always immediately after it, he proceeded to the point that the capitalist state had, besides a predominantly ``oppressive'' apparatus (army, police, bureaucracy), an apparatus that performed the work of accounting: "This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and the wires they pull must be cut off, lopped off, chopped away from this apparatus; it must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive and nationwide.''^^2^^ The proletarian state would need, experienced organisers of production; it would need more engineers, agronomists, technicians, and scientific experts. And in order to attract them, Lenin wrote, it would be necessary to preserve higher pay for their work during the transition period.
In putting forward and defending views permeated with deep faith in the creative capacities of the broadest masses of the people, but, at the same time, without exaggerating the real level of their education and cultural standards, Lenin maintained that there might even be a certain return to ``primitive'' democracy during the transition period, but that would not be so terrible. Rejection of bourgeois parliamentarianism (at that time there was no other kind) by no means signified rejection of representative institutions in general. The whole nub was for the elected representatives not to be cut off from the people and themselves to work. Lenin saw the advantages of the system of Soviets as a new constitutional authority, as the second political form of the dictatorship of the proletariat (after the Paris Commune), in their close link with the masses, and their greater democracy. By providing leadership of the masses by the proletarian vanguard, they made it possible to unite the advantages of parliamentarianism with those of immediate, direct democracy. And, he concluded, "compared with the bour~^^1^^ Ibid., pp. 430-31.
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 105-106.
1 V I Lenin, "The State and Revolution", op. clt.t pp. 457, 425, 477, 426.
2 Ibid., pp. 457-58, 466, 466-67.
60CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
61geois parliamentary system, this is an advance in democracy's development which is of world-wide, historic significance.''^^1^^
In the autumn of 1917 all the political trends of the day from the Cadets to the ``quarter-Bolsheviks'' of the Novaya Zhizn newspaper, unanimously considered that the Bolsheviks either would not venture to take over full power in the country alone, or would he unable to hold it for even a short time. Answering them in the article Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, Lenin examined the arguments of his opponents and the sceptics one by one and showed their insolvency. Summing up a comprehensive analysis of the economic and political outlook for Russia to advance in the vanguard of mankind to a new social system, he wrote these prophetic words: "Justice alone, the mere anger of the people against exploitation, would never have brought them onto the true path of socialism. But now that, thanks to capitalism, the material apparatus of the big banks, syndicates, railways, and so forth, has grown, now that the immense experience of the advanced countries has accumulated a stock of engineering marvels, the employment of which is being hindered by capitalism, now that the class-conscious workers have built up a party of a quarter of a million members to systematically lay hold of this apparatus and set it in motion with the support of all the working and exploited people---now that these conditions exist, no power on earth can prevent the Bolsheviks, ij they do not allow themselves to be scared and if they succeed in taking power, from retaining it until the triumph of the world socialist revolution."2 The ideas Lenin put forward on the eve of the October Revolution concerning the relation of democracy and socialism, and the economic and socio-political problems of the transition from capitalism to socialism have lost none of their importance in our day; they, moreover,* have acquired new meaning and a new ring. Lenin's legacy is an invaluable example! of the combination of penetrating theoretical analysis of the development of the capitalist mode of production and practical development of the strategy and tactics of the fight for the socialist revolution. It remains an inexhaustible source of ideas for the contemporary revolutionary movement.
STEERING FOR AN ARMED UPRISING
The violence they resorted to against the revolutionary masses in the days of the July crisis put the leaders of the conciliatory parties
on a par with open counter-revolutionaries. The Provisional Government won by means that undermined the foundations of its authority, i.e. the masses' instinctive confidence and their classcollaborationist illusions. But it did not achieve any serious weakening of the revolutionary forces. The Bolsheviks were able to retreat in time and withdraw their main cadres from danger.
The Provisional Government, having established single power by force, ended the possibility of peaceful development of the revolution. The spokesmen of the bourgeoisie and landowners increased their pressure, declaring: "There is only one road---strong and firm authority". Milyukov demanded abolition of the "multipower situation of spontaneous and self-styled committees exercising their own full will".^^1^^ The Government introduced the death penalty at the front. In that situation, an armed clash between the revolutionary forces and the counter-revolutionaries became inevitable.
The 6th Congress of the Bolshevik Party, held in July-August 1917 in Petrograd, worked in semi-legal conditions. Lenin was not present, but his works and his theses on the political situation underlay the Congress' decisions. The resolution on the political situation said that "at the present time peaceful development and a painless transfer of power to the Soviets have become impossible because power has already passed in fact into the hands of the counter-- revolutionary bourgeoisie". The task of the Russian working class and of the poorest strata of town and country was therefore "to strain every effort to take over state power and direct it, in alliance with the revolutionary proletariat of the advanced countries, to peace and the socialist reconstruction of society.''^^2^^
After discussion, Lenin's proposal to suspend the slogan "All Power to theJSoviets!" was adopted, since under the leadership of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries they had been turned into docile tools of the Provisional Government. That did not mean, however, a rejection of the Soviets in general; the Bolsheviks had to defend all mass organisations of the workers against the counterrevolution, above all the Soviets, works committees, and soldiers' and peasants' committees; in many proletarian centres the Soviets remained agencies of revolutionary power. The congress adopted a course of organising and preparing all revolutionary forces for the moment when a national crisis and the deepening of the mass struggle would provide the conditions for a successful armed uprising. This new orientation of the Party and the line of armed uprising adopted by it, were the answer to the change in the situation, the
~^^1^^ The Bourgeoisie and Landowners in 1917, Moscow-Leningrad, 1932, pp. 193, 214 (in Russian).
~^^8^^ The 6th Congress of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks). August 1917. Minutes, Moscow, 1958, pp. 256-57 (in Russian).
i V.I. Lenin, "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", op. cit., p. 104. * Ibid., p. 130.
62CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
03development of a tactic that corresponded to the new situation.
``Events took a turn that sent the Russian revolution along a different, non-peaceful way. But the very fact that he posed the question of the possibility in principle, of the revolution developing along one of two ways is in itself an achievement of Lenin's thinking which is meaningful to this very day.''^^1^^
f|j£..
The counter-revolution, having resorted to violence in July, continued along that road, striving to establish a military dictatorship in the country. The choice for dictator was General L. G. Kornilov, well-known for his reactionary views, appointed Commander-- inChief in July. A counter-revolutionary conspiracy was hatched: revolutionary-minded units were being disbanded at the front, and at the same time shock battalions were being formed to[fight the revolution. On August 25, General Kornilov moved loyal troops to Petrograd and demanded that all military and civil authority be transferred
to him.
Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, who had been involved in this conspiracy in its early stages, dissociated himself from Kornilov at the last moment and removed him from the post of C-in-C. Kerensky's vacillations reflected the deep confusion in the ranks of the conciliatory parties. While at the top they were conspiring directly or indirectly with the counter-revolution, the|masses by no means wanted to see the power of the military restored.
The Bolsheviks played the main role in rebuffing the forces of counter-revolution. The revolutionary regiments and workers' brigades of Petrograd moved to meet Kornilov's troops. Agitators penetrated the latter and incited the soldiers to refuse to march on Petrograd. The mutiny was a complete fiasco.
During the fight against Kornilov a serious shift occurred in the mood of the workers and soldiers. It had begun before the mutiny and the defeat of the mutiny made 'the change irreversible. "The soldiers are increasingly coming over to our side," the Bolshevik committee in Wenden wrote to the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B) on 11 August. "Animosity against the counter-revolution is growing. The Socialist-Revolutionaries are beginning to talk `Bolshevik' language with the soldiers ... but the soldiers say: if you agree with the Bolsheviks then there's no need for us to follow you, we'll go straight to the Bolsheviks.''
A letter from the Vladimir Province communicated that "the Kornilov days have finally cured" all illusions and that now "the workers are completely under the influence of the Bolsheviks". The secretary of the Donets-Krivoi Rog Provincial Committee, F. A. Artem (Ser-
geyev), also wrote about this. The South-Western Provincial Committee reported in mid-September that in the armies of that front "the revolutionary mood is growing from day to day.... In many units whole companies when asked, 'Are there any Bolsheviks among you?', reply: `We're all Bolsheviks'.''^^1^^
The activity of the Soviets revived everywhere. As a result of byelections for the Petrograd city and district Soviets the position of the Bolsheviks was significantly strengthened in the capital. I.G. Egorov, a worker at the Putilov Works, became chairman of the Peterhof District Soviet, and S.S. Zorin, a worker of the Sestroretsk Works, headed the Sestroretsk District Soviet.
On August 31 the Petrograd Soviet passed a Bolshevik resolution on power and 10 days later the Bolsheviks won leadership in the Soviet. On September 5 the same resolution was passed by the Moscow Soviet, and its Executive Committee was re-elected, with V. P. Nogin, member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, becoming chairman of the Executive. In the course of September 1 alone, 126 local Soviets declared their support of transfer of all power to the Soviets. A leading Bolshevik in the Caucasus, S.G. Shahumyan, wrote from Baku: "The Bolshevisation observable throughout Russia has also manifested itself on a broadest scale in our oil kingdom.... Yesterday's bosses of the situation, the Mensheviks, don't dare show themselves in the workers' districts.''^^2^^
With many Soviets declaring themselves against political collaboration with the bourgeoisie, possibilities of a peaceful development of the revolution again opened up. On August 31 the Bolshevik Central Committee appealed to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets to remove the Cadets and form a government of representatives of the proletariat and peasantry. The Petrograd and Moscow Soviets voted for this proposal. The Bolsheviks were ready to compromise and support a Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik government that would ensure transfer of power to the Soviets. "Now, and only now," Lenin wrote, "perhaps during only a few days or a week or two, such a government could be set up and consolidated in a perfectly peaceful way." The Bolsheviks were ready to make this compromise solely for the sake of peaceful development of the revolution---an opportunity "extremely rare in history and extremely valuable".^^3^^ But the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks rejected the proposal, and the last such opportunity was missed. There
~^^1^^ Correspondence of the Secretariat of the CC RSDLP(B) with Local Party Organisations. March-October 1917. Collection of Documents, Vol. I, Moscow, 1957, pp. 203, 230, 237, 443 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ S.G. Shahumyan, Selected Works, Vol. 2, (1917-1918), Moscow, 1958, p.95 (in Russian).
~^^3^^ See V.I. Lenin, "On Compromise", Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 308-309.
~^^1^^ L.I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course. Speeches and Articles, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, pp. 259-60.
CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
65remained only the road of armed struggle for power of the Soviets. At that time the mass action reached an unprecedented scale. The working class was forging ahead. While in the first half of the year strikes had arisen mainly on economic grounds and were unconcerted, now, in the autumn, they began to affect whole industries and had a predominantly political character. Political demands were put forward during many of the strikes in the Ukraine in the second half of 1917. In the Urals, there were 209 strikes from July through October, of them 60 economic, 71 political, and 78 with both economic and political demands. The number of strikers in the Urals was 138,144 of whom 112,200 took part in political strikes, 7,220 in mixed strikes and 18,724 in purely economic ones. The slogans of the Urals general political strike of September 1, in which more than 110,000 workers took part, were "Immediate Convening of the AllRussia Congress of Soviets!", "Down with the Counter-revolutionary Dictatorship!" and "Long Live the Proletarian Revolution!". At the «nd of September there were general strikes of railwaymen and Baku oil workers; the mass strikes of the miners of the Donbass in September-October involved up to 280,000 men.^^1^^ The miners confiscated several pits, and arrested their owners for refusing to meet the demands of workers' control. The Provisional Government sent troops there to suppress the action. In August a strike of Moscow tanners began for a revision of wage rates. It was supported in a number of other towns, and in September became a national strike. At the beginning of October the tanners passed a resolution on transfer of all power to the Soviets and demanded the taking over of enterprises whose owners were unwilling to conclude collective agreements with the workers. More than 100,000 workers took part in the railwaymen's general strike. In October a strike of the textile workers of the Central Industrial Region involved around 300,000. The metal workers of Kharkov, Tula, Nizhny Novgorod, and other cities went on strike. Everywhere the demand for transfer of power to the Soviets
was in the foreground.
``""^Peasants were being drawn more and more actively into the revolutionary movement. Their dissatisfaction and anger rose as they saw that no solution of the agrarian question was forthcoming from the Provisional Government. The Socialist-Revolutionary Minister of Agriculture, S. L. Maslov, introduced a land bill that simply proposed recording privately-owned properties. "The S.R. Party," Lenin wrote in this connection, "has deceived the peasants: it has crawled away from its own land bill and has adopted the plan of
~^^1^^ See I.I. Mints, History of the Great October Revolution, Vol. 2, Moscow, 1978, pp. 711-13 (in Russian).
the landowners and Cadets.''^^1^^ The Bolshevik Party organisations sent workers and revolutionary soldiers to the villages to call on the peasants to take the land from the landlords immediately. In the autumn of 1917 the peasant movement embraced more than 90 per cent of the uezds of the European part of Russia and developed into a peasant uprising. Even those peasants who had voted in the Soviets for the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in practice followed the calls of the Bolsheviks and seized landlords' land and implements without authorisation. In September and October there were more than 3,500 agrarian conflicts in six regions, including 1,349 in the Central Agricultural Region and 1,670 in the Volga Area. They were distinguished by mass action and the acute struggle characteristic of a peasant war (armed seizures, destruction, burning down of manor houses). Many of the peasant actions had an anti-kulak, as well as an anti-landlord character. In the Simbirsk, Kazan and Saratov provinces, for example, more than a third of all the actions were directed against kulaks and big farmers, breakaways from the village community. The Kerensky Government sent punitive expeditions. Yet, that could not lower the tension of the peasant struggle. Moreover, it demonstrated that the Government was the enemy of the peasantry.
Already in August 1917 the Izvestia of the All-Russia Soviet of Reasant Deputies published a "basic mandate" compiled from 242 mandates of local Soviets, that demanded abolition of private property in land without compensation, confiscation of estates and equitable land tenure. The Socialist-Revolutionary Party, however, though it considered itself the spokesman of the peasants' interests, did not support this programme. The Party itself entered a grave crisis. In the autumn of 1917 a left wing emerged, dissatisfied with the leadership's policy. It won a majority in the Petrograd, Voronezh, and other organisations and in fact formed a new party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, which demanded transfer of all land to land committees and its immediate socialisation. As Lenin stressed, however, only the revolutionary proletariat led by the Bolshevik Party toward the overthrow of capitalism could in fact implement the programme of the peasant poor set out in 242 mandates.^^2^^
In the army, especially on fronts close to Petrograd and Moscow, bolshevisation was making rapid strides. The bureau of the Bolshevik military organisations in the 12th Army stationed near Petrograd reported to the Central Committee in the middle of September: "Our organisation is growing daily; the vast majority of the troops of the 12th Army are on our side. Whole regiments have joined us." The
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Socialist-Revolutionary Party Cheats the Peasants Once Again", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 228.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "From a Publicist's Diary", op. cit., p. 284. 8-1323
66CHAPTER ONE
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
67South-Western provincial committee reported on the militant mood of the soldiers of the 8th Army, who unanimously supported the Bolsheviks' demands and met the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks with catcalls: "You Kornilovites are selling out the
Revolution.''^^1^^
The liberation struggle of the non-Russian population of Russia was mounting. Lenin wrote in September: "The policy of annexation and open violence pursued by the Bonapartist Kerensky and Co. towards the non-sovereign nations of Russia has borne fruit. Wide sections of the people of the oppressed nations (i.e., including the mass of the petty bourgeoisie) trust the proletariat of Russia more than they do the bourgeoisie, for here history has brought to the fore the struggle for liberation of the oppressed nations against the oppressing nations. The bourgeoisie has despicably betrayed the cause of freedom of the oppressed nations; the proletariat is faithful to the cause of freedom.''^^2^^ In Latvia, Estonia and Byelorussia the Bolsheviks had considerable success; in the Ukraine, the Transcaucasia and Central Asia they were fighting bourgeois nationalists in
very difficult conditions.
The uniting of the proletarian movement with the general democratic revolutionary streams, viz., the peasant fight against the landlords and the liberation movement of the oppressed nations, gave the struggle a country-wide character and irresistible force. The authorities of the bourgeois government were losing control. The Cadet party was politically bankrupt. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks were in a state of confusion. Economic disaster was imminent, with stagnation, hunger and inflation rapidly becoming worse.
The 2nd Congress of Soviets was due to meet in September, but the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leadership of the Central Executive Committee, not reckoning to get a majority, decided to postpone it. Instead, an All-Russia Democratic Conference was convened on September 14 in Petrograd. Around 1,500 delegates took part, mainly from organisations under the influence of conciliators and the bourgeoisie (city dumas, zemstvos^^3^^ and co-operative societies), while the Soviets were allocated only 230 mandates. There were 136 Bolshevik delegates. The purpose of the conference was to decide the issue of power through the forming of a new coalition government. The conciliators counted, by means of fiddling and manoeuvres, and exploiting parliamentary illusions, on deflecting the masses
~^^1^^ Correspondence of the Secretariat of the CC RSDLP(B), Vol.1, pp. 349, 448.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", op. cit., p. 98.
~^^3^^ A duma was an old-type municipal council and a zemstvo a rural county and provincial council, elected on a limited, class-differentiated franchise.---
Translator's note.
from the revolutionary struggle and blocking further development of the revolution. But the idea of a coalition with the Cadets failed: three-quarters of the representatives of the workers' Soviets, works committees and trade unions voted against it and were supported by the representatives of peasant Soviets and ethnic organisations. The Provisional Council of the Russian Republic (the Preparliament) elected by the presiding board of the Democratic Conference and later supplemented with government-nominated bourgeois elements became a consultative body under the Provisional Government. Its composition did not correspond to the real balance of forces, and it was unable to take a concerted decision on any serious issue. That was further evidence that not only the masses were unwilling to live in the old way but, in addition, those at the top could no longer rule in the old way.
``The crisis has matured", Lenin wrote at the end of September. The turning point of the revolution had come. Peasant insurrections were growing in the countryside, the masses of the soldiers and workers were tending toward the Bolsheviks, and the whole future of the Russian and international revolution was at stake.^^1^^ The question of how to determine on whose side the majority of the people were acquired great political and practical significance. The Bolsheviks, actively involved in various election campaigns, understood that the results of the voting did not fully reflect the people's will in a situation when the dominant classes had the economic and political means to influence the voters. When, in the autumn of 1917, Kamenev and Zinoviev said "We have no majority among the people, and without this condition the uprising is hopeless", Lenin ironically commented that they would like to have a guarantee in advance that the Bolsheviks would get "exactly one-half of the votes plus one" throughout the country. But who could give such a guarantee? " History has never given such a guarantee, and is quite unable to give it in any revolution.''^^2^^ Drawing on the experience of various countries, he considered that what was needed for victory was not an arithmetic, but a revolutionary majority. The outcome of a revolution was not decided by the ballot box but by most energetic and vigorous actions of the opposed classes and their allies. A revolutionary majority was a majority of the politically active masses involved in the struggle.^^3^^
Lenin's conclusion in the autumn of 1917 that the Party already had such a majority, was based on the sum total of very important facts. The elections in August and September to the city and district
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Crisis Has Matured", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 82.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Letter to Comrades", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 196.
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power", Collected Works, Vol. 26. P. 19.
5*
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
69uo
dumas in Petrograd and Moscow showed a continuing rise in the popularity of the Bolsheviks. Having obtained 11.6 per cent of the vote in the June elections to the Moscow City Duma, the Bolsheviks in September got 51.5 per cent of the vote in the district duma elections. Most of the peasant Soviets, previously almost wholly in the hands of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, now, in spite of their leaders, came out against collaboration with the bourgeoisie. A stream of reports from the fronts indicated that the soldiers were more and more decidedly passing to the side of the Bolsheviks. The peasant insurrections against the Provisional Government across the country were direct support of the Bolshevik Party's policy. And, moreover, the soldiers were refusing to fire on the peasants.^^1^^ Subsequently Lenin wrote that in October 1917 the Bolsheviks relied on (1) the overwhelming majority of the proletariat, (2) almost half of the army, and (3) an overwhelming preponderance of forces at the decisive moment at the decisive spots, namely in the 2 capitals (Petrograd and Moscow) and in the fronts near the centre.^^2^^
Only when convinced of that did Lenin deem it possible to pose the issue of insurrection in practical terms. In a letter to the Central Committee and the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the Party of 12-14 (25-27) September he said: "The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands.... We are concerned now not with the `day', or `moment' of insurrection in the narrow sense of the word. That will be only decided by the common voice of those who are in contact with the
workers and soldiers, with the masses__ The point is to make the
task clear to the Party. The present task must be an armed uprising in Petrograd and Moscow.... It would be naive to wait for a `formal' majority for the Bolsheviks; no revolution ever waits for that."3 In preparing the decisive attack on the positions of the bourgeoisie, the Bolshevik Party warned the masses against premature, unorganised actions, called for restraint and discipline, exposed the calls of the anarchists and restrained the impatient. In his article Marxism and Insurrection Lenin explained that insurrection had to be regarded as an art. To be successful, "insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class, ... upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people". It was necessary to determine the time for an insurrection correctly, choosing the critical moment for it when the advanced ranks of the people had achieved maximum activity and there was particularly strong wavering in
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Letter to Comrades", op. cit., pp. 196-97.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat", Collected Works, Vol. 30, Moscow, 1977, pp. 262.
s V.I. Lenin, "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power", op. cit., pp. 19-21.
the ranks of the enemies and the ambivalent friends of the revolution. Evaluating the situation Lenin concluded that there were all objective preconditions for a successful insurrection.^^1^^
On October 1 (14), in a "Letter to the Central Committee, the Moscow and Petrograd Committees, and the Bolshevik Members of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets" he wrote that the Bolsheviks "must take power at once". Proposing the slogans "Power to the Soviets, Land to the Peasants, Peace to the Nations, Bread to the Starving", he emphasised: "Victory is certain, and the chances are ten to one that it will be a bloodless victory. To wait would be a crime to the revolution.''^^2^^
In those days, in an article Advice of an Onlooker Lenin stressed: "Never play with insurrection, but when beginning it realise firmly that you must go all the way. Concentrate a great superiority of forces at the decisive point and at the decisive moment, otherwise the enemy, who has the advantage of better preparation and organisation, will destroy the insurgents. Once the insurrection has begun, you must act with the greatest determination, and by all means, without fail, take the offensive. 'The defensive is the death of every armed rising.' You must try to take the enemy by surprise and seize the moment while his forces are scattered. You must strive for daily successes, however small, and at all costs retain 'moral superiority'."3 On 10 (23) October, at an underground meeting, after a report by Lenin who had secretly returned to Petrograd from Finland, the Central Committee decided by ten votes to two (Kamenev and Zinoviev) to prepare for insurrection. Its premise was that the international position of the Russian Revolution demanded this. The anti-war insurrection in the German fleet was "a manifestation of a growing world socialist revolution throughout Europe", while at the same time there was a danger of a deal between the imperialists in order to strangle the revolution in Russia. The home situation was characterised on the one hand by a danger of the bourgeoisie and Kerensky surrendering Petrograd to the Germans and preparation of a "second Kornilov revolt", and on the other by the Bolsheviks winning a majority in the Soviets, the peasant insurrection, and thepublic mood turning in favour of the Bolshevik Party. "Recognising, therefore, that an armed insurrection is inevitable and has fully matured, the Central Committee proposes that all organisations of the Party be guided by this, and discuss and decide all practical questions from that standpoint.''^^4^^
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Marxism and Insurrection", Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 22-25.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 140-41.
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 180.
~^^4^^ Minutes of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B). August 1917 to February 1918, Moscow, 1958, p. 86 (in Russian).
WORKING CLASS COMES TO POWER
71The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison and the armies of the Northern and Western fronts, nearest to the capital, and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, were a reliable support of the Bolsheviks. The Military Revolutionary Committee, planned concerted action of three main forces in the insurrection---the Red Guard, army units and the navy, more than 300,000 fighters all in all. The forces of the revolution were ready for the decisive battle for power in the capital. They had the support of the millions of the working people throughout the country. Everywhere Bolshevik conferences were held, and Red Guard units were being formed. The army of the socialist revolution was poised for the attack.
Preparations for the insurrection entered the decisive phase. A special body was set up under the Petrograd Soviet for its practical leadership---the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC). Its nucleus became the Military Revolutionary Centre of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party set up on October 16 and consisting of A. S. Bubnov, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, Ya. M. Sverdlov, J. V. Stalin, and M. S. Uritsky. The same day the Central Committee, with representatives of party and trade union organisations taking part, reviewed the question of readiness for an armed uprising.
Kamenev and Zinoviev, members of the Central Committee, opposed insurrection, pinning all their hopes on a Constituent Assembly. Trotsky, at that time chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, proposed waiting for the opening of the 2nd All-Russia Congress of Soviets scheduled for October 25 (November 7), so that it could decide the issue of power. But without a victorious armed insurrection the Congress would not have the power to overthrow the Provisional Government. Meanwhile, postponement of the uprising would give the government a chance to rally forces to suppress it. The insurrection, Lenin considered, must necessarily begin before the Congress started its work. "There is not the slightest doubt," he wrote, "that the Bolsheviks, if they let themselves be caught in the trap of constitutional illusions, `faith' in the Congress of Soviets and in the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, `waiting' for the Congress of Soviets, and so forth---these Bolsheviks would most certainly be miserable traitors
to the proletarian cause.''^^1^^
The Central Committee of the RSDLP(B), rejecting all essentially defeatist proposals, decided that the Party must energetically rally forces for the impending battles. On the night of October 20, in the apartment of a worker, D. A. Pavlov, Lenin discussed the preparations for the insurrection with the leaders of the Central Committee's Military Organisation N. I. Podvoisky, V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko, and V. I. Nevsky. He insisted on speeding them up and increasing the combat capacity of the Red Guard.
The Red Guard was the core of the armed forces of the revolution. In Petrograd and its suburbs it numbered around 23,000 men at the moment of the insurrection, and consisted almost wholly (95.9 per cent) of workers, primarily metal workers.^^2^^ Its arms were made and repaired by the workers in the war factories. The Red Guards were trained and drilled in the works and factories by revolutionary soldiers.
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Crisis Has Matured", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 81.
~^^2^^ V.I. Startsev, Essays on the History of the Petrograd Red Guard and Workers' Militia (March 1917-April 1918), Moscow-Leningrad, 1965, p. 255 (in Russian) .
Chapter 2 VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
73which said: "The Provisional Government has been deposed. Statepower has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies---the Revolutionary Military Committee, which heads the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.''^^1^^' The MRC called for the authority of the Soviets to be established everywhere.
At 10.40 p.m. the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies opened in the white marble hall of the Smolny Institute. Representatives of 402 Soviets---city, provincial^ county and district---had arrived from all over the country, including the non-Russian ethnic parts---the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, the Caucasus, Turkestan and Central Asia. Most of the Soviets represented were joint: 195 Sovietsof Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and 119 Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. The call of the Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet to the representatives of Soldiers' Soviets just before the insurrection was typical: "You are not going there tobandy words, but to conclude the great cause of emancipating labour,, and this Congress must take power into its own hands, and you must give it support with all the means available to you." An analysis of the 670 questionnaires filled in by the delegates showed that 505> were firmly committed to transfer of all power to the Soviets.^^2^^
In spite of obstruction by a group of Mensheviks and Right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries who demonstratively walked out of the Congress, two night sessions were enough to take historic decisions. At the first an appeal to workers, soldiers and peasants, drafted by^ Lenin and read out by A. V. Lunacharsky, was adopted. It said that the Congress was taking over power and resolved "that all local authority be transferred to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, which must ensure genuine revolutionary order".^^3^^
Lenin came to the second session of the Congress. Here is how theAmerican journalist John Reed present there described the scene: "It was just 8.40 when a thundering wave of cheers announced theentrance of the presidium, with Lenin---great Lenin---among them. A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging. Little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide, generous mouth,. and heavy chin; clean shaven now, but already beginning to bristlewith the well-known beard of his past and future. Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be theidol of the mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "To the Citizens of Russia!", Collected Works, Vol. 26, 1964,. p. 236.
~^^2^^ The 2nd All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.. A Collection of Documents, Moscow, 1957, pp. 15, 210 (in Russian).
~^^3^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, Moscow, 1957, p. 8 (in Russian).
THE PROLETARIAT TAKES POWER
On October 24 (November 6), 1917, Red Guard units began occupying the strategic points in the capital---bridges and the post and telegraph offices, and gathered at the Smolny, where the headquarters of the revolution, the Central and Petersburg Committees of the Bolsheviks, the Petrograd Soviet and the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) were located. Hot on the heels of the Red Guard came sailors and military units. The MRC put three of its members, V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko, N. I. Podvoisky and G. I. Chudnovsky, in charge of combat operations. Late in the evening Lenin, leaving his hide-out, came to the Smolny and immediately assumed the guidance of the armed struggle. K. A. Mekhonoshin, an MRC member, later wrote: "Reports from everywhere came to him, he always managed to give very valuable, precise instructions, to spot danger in good time at one point or another. Comrade Lenin was the real commander-in-chief of all the armed forces of the October Revolution.''^^1^^
By the morning of October 25 (November 7) workers and revolutionary troops had occupied almost the whole of the city. The insurrection was completed the following night; the Winter Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government, was stormed after an ultimatum to surrender had been rejected. The vast superiority of forces on the Bolsheviks' side, and the resolute leadership of the uprising ensured a rapid and almost bloodless victory: while more than 1,300 had been killed and wounded in the days of the February Revolution, in October, 6 persons were killed in the capital and 50 wounded.^^2^^
On the historic day of October 25 (November 7), 1917 the MRC published an appeal to the citizens of Russia, written by Lenin,
~^^1^^ Lenin, Leader of October. Reminiscences of Petrograd Workers, Leningrad,
1956, p. 191 (in Russian).
2 History of the CPSU, Vol. 2, Moscow, 1966, p. 700; Vol. 3, Book 1, Moscow, 1967, p. 328 (in Russian).
VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
have been. A strange popular leader---a leader purely by virtue of intellect, colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies---but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analysing a concrete situation.
``And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.''^^1^^
Following Lenin's report the Congress unanimously passed a
Decree on Peace. It was supported in speeches by F. E. Dzerzhinsky •(the Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania), P. I. Stucka (the Social-Democracy of Latvia), and V.S. Mickevi•cus-Kapsukas (the Lithuanian Social-Democrats). A Decree on Land drafted by Lenin was passed with one vote against and eight abstentions. A decree on the organisation of power established that the supreme body of authority was the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, and between congresses the All-Russia Central Executive Committee •(ARCEC) of Soviets. Russia was proclaimed the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). To govern the country a Workers' and Peasants' Government, the Council of People's Commissars (CPC), was created. Resolutions on ensuring revolutionary order in localities and abolishing the death penalty at the front revived by Krensky were also passed.
Thus, for the first time in history, a state arose in which the proletariat had become the ruling class. And its first act was to adopt a programme corresponding to the deepest aspirations of the working people: peace, land, and power of the Soviets.
The counter-revolution made a frantic attempt to recover power. Kerensky, who had fled to the HQ of the Northern Front, moved on Petrograd at the head of several of General P. N. Krasnov's Cossack squadrons. While a mutiny of officer cadets began in the capital, Cossacks occupied Gatchina and Tsarskoye Selo, and reached the Pulkovo Hills. This was a precarious situation. A state of emergency was declared in Petrograd. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, and sailors of the Baltic Fleet defended the city at the call of the new government. The mutinies were quickly suppressed.
The victory of the revolution in Petrograd had to be consolidated in Moscow, the second biggest economic, political, and administrative •centre of Russia, and in fact its second capital. But events developed there with more difficulty than in Petrograd.
On the morning of October 25 (November 7), when news of victory •of the revolution arrived from Petrograd, the Moscow Bolshevik •Committee set up a party combat centre incorporating M. F. Vladi-
~^^1^^ John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, The Modern. Library. New York, 1935, p. 125.
mirsky, V. N. Podbelsky, I. A. Pyatnitsky, and Emelyan Yaroslavsky. By the evening the Moscow Soviet had formed a Military Revolutionary Committee which included several Mensheviks as well as Bolsheviks. The forces of the revolution relied on the Red Guard and a majority of the garrison. The revolutionary soldiers set up •guard of the Post Office and the Central Telegraph Office, the issue of bourgeois newspapers was suspended. But officer cadets seized the Manege and the building of the City Duma. The Committee of Public Safety, headed by the Mayor, the Right Socialist-Revolutionary V. V. Rudnev, began negotiations with the MRC on the withdrawal of troops, striving to gain time and placing its hopes on the arrival of troops summoned from the Western and South-Western Fronts. The counter-revolutionaries succeeded in occupying the Kremlin. They machine-gunned revolutionary soldiers captured there and gained control of the city centre. The revolutionary forces, relying on district Military Revolutionary Committees, consolidated in the working-class districts on the outskirts. Only after the MRC's call for a general political strike was there a turn in the course of the struggle.
On October 28 (November 10) the workers of Moscow factories concertedly stopped work and began to arm and join the Red Guard. Its strength rapidly grew to 30,000. The revolutionary units, passing to the offensive, soon blocked off the centre. The Red Guards of Moscow factories, soldiers of reserve regiments and cyclists were involved in heavy fighting. Red Guard units came to their aid from Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Klin, Vladimir, Tula, Ivanovo-Voznesensk and other towns. A detachment of sailors, soldiers, and Red Guards moved oiiMoscowfromPetrograd. At dawn on November 3 (16) revolutionary units broke the enemy resistance and entered the Kremlin. The Soviets won. During the fighting around 1,000 people were killed. Nearly'400of them were buried in a common grave at the Kremlin wall.^^1^^ The counter-revolutionaries' plans to make Moscow a bastion of struggle against the Soviets were dashed.
THE TRIUMPHAL MARCH OF SOVIET POWER
Victory of the revolution in Petrograd and Moscow, the formation of a Government of Soviets and the decrees on peace and land raised all working people of the country to fight for liberation. The Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia, passed on November 2 (15), proclaimed the equality and sovereignty of nations and their right to free self-determination, secession and formation of independent
~^^1^^ G.S. Ignatiev, October 1917 in Moscow, Moscow, 1964, p. 133 (in Russian).
76CHAPTER TWO
VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
77states. It abolished all and every national and national-religious privilege and restriction, and proclaimed free development for all national minorities and ethnic groups. The policy of national oppression rejected, the new authorities embarked on a policy of full emancipation and voluntary union of the nations of Russia. Two months later the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People proclaimed the main principles and tasks of the socialist state, stressing that all power should belong wholly and exclusively to the working masses and their plenipotentiary representatives, the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies.^^1^^
These decrees and declaration were convincing the working people in practice that the Soviets were their own power. As Lenin recalled later: "From the very outset we gave the ordinary workers and peasants an idea of our policy in the form of decrees. The result was the enormous confidence we enjoyed and now enjoy among the masses of the people.''^^2^^ This, as well as the Bolsheviks' immense organisational ana educational work, and the heroic endeavour of Russia's proletariat, was a factor that ensured victory for the Soviets throughout the country within three to four months. Considering the vast expanse of Russia, and the diversity of the socio-political situation, that was an exceptionally short period. That is why Lenin wrote and spoke of the "triumphal march" of Soviet power.
The concrete forms of the transfer of power to the Soviets locally, peaceful or armed, and the time when their authority was established depended on the balance of class forces, and sometimes on specific local and ethnic factors. In some areas it happened immediately and easily, in others after a stubborn, sanguinary struggle. The industrial centres, the concentrations of the main forces of the working class, were bastions of the revolution from the outset. Of the 97 largest towns of Russia, power of the Soviets was established in a peaceful way in 80.^^3^^
In the Central Industrial Region, accounting for almost half the industrial proletariat of the country, the Soviets took power either simultaneously with Petrograd and Moscow or soon after them. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Shuya, Kostroma, Tver, Bryansk, Yaroslavl, Vladimir, Ryazan, Serpukhov, and other towns, the local Soviets, led by Bolsheviks, had actually exercised power even before the October armed insurrection. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, for instance, already in the evening of October 25 (November 7), as soon as news of the events in the capital became known, the Soviet of Workers'
~^^1^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, pp. 39-41, 341.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B)", Collected Works, Vol. 33,
1976, p. 303.
~^^3^^ I.I. Mints, History of the Great October Revolution, Vol. 3, Moscow,
1973, pp.704-705 (in Russian).
and Soldiers' Deputies, led by the Bolshevik F. N. Samoilov, moved to take power. A provisional revolutionary headquarters was appointed, under the chairmanship of D. A. Furmanov. With the help of the Red Guard, it ensured revolutionary order. In Orel and Kursk the Soviets took power peacefully, too.
Events developed in a more complicated way in towns where leadership of the Soviets remained in the hands of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. In Voronezh the provincial Soviet refused to recognise the Government of Soviets. The provincial Bolshevik committee formed a revolutionary committee of three Bolsheviks and two Left Socialist-Revolutionaries on October 26 (November 8), which decided to take power. The collaborationist Soviet jointly with the officers of the garrison and the bourgeois City Duma organised a Committee of Public Salvation. After a day's fight the soldiers and the Red Guards put the Revolutionary Committee in power. Shortly afterwards, new elections for the Soviet were held. In Smolensk, too, the issue of power was settled in armed struggle. In Tula the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee negotiated with the Committee of Popular Struggle, while at the same time arming revolutionary squads. By December 7 (20) the Bolsheviks predominated in the Soviet and it assumed power.
In the Volga Area the proletarian centres---Kazan, Samara, Saratov and Tsaritsyn were Bolshevik strongholds, and power of the Soviets was established there at the end of October. In December, the Soviets won in Simbirsk and Penza. In the working-class Urals, where more than two-thirds of the Soviets followed the Bolsheviks, they took power, as a rule, without armed struggle. In Perm and Vyatka the Bolsheviks had first to win a majority in the Soviets. In Astrakhan the officer and Cossack squads were only defeated at the end of January 1918 after protracted fighting. In the Orenburg province a counter-revolutionary centre arose, headed by ataman (Cossack commander) A. I. Dutov who raised a mutiny that was only suppressed in the spring of 1918.
The army, several million-strong, was an immense political and armed force. The Northern and Western Fronts, nearest to the capitals, and the Baltic Fleet actively supported the armed insurrection in Petrograd. The 40,000 men of the Lettish Riflemen immediately took the side of the Soviet Government, but the HQ of the Supreme Command under General N. N. Dukhonin (after Kerensky's flight he had proclaimed himself Supreme Commander), located in Moghilev, became a centre of counter-revolution on a countrywide scale. It did not manage to move frontline troops on Moscow, but it tried to retain leadership of them, formed "shock units" against the involution, and sabotaged any efforts to propose an armistice on the fronts, initiated by the Council of People's Commissars. Dukhonin was dis-
78CHAPTER TWO
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79>
placed on the night of November 8 (21), and a Bolshevik, Regimental Sergeant-Major N. V. Krylenko, was appointed Supreme Commander. Ten days later, the GHQ was taken without a fight, with the support of the revolutionary soldiers. Dukhonin, who a day before ordered the release from arrest in Bykhovo of the leaders of the August mutiny L. G. Kornilov, A. I. Denikin and others, was killed by infuriated sailors. GHQ was put at the service of Soviet
power.
In Estonia, and the parts of Latvia and Byelorussia not occupied by the Germans, the conditions were favourable for the proletarian revolution. Many Soviets were already in the hands of the Bolsheviks in early October, and the nationalist parties were almost completely isolated. The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Estonian area, led by J. J. Anwelt, V. E. Kingisepp, and I. V. Rabchinsky, proclaimed workers' power in the middle of November, and repelled bourgeoisie's attempts to overthrow it. A constitution of the Estland Workers' Commune was drafted, and workers' control was introduced in enterprises. In Latvia the establishment of Soviet power was confirmed by the 2nd Congress of Workers', Soldiers', and Landless Peasants' Deputies, convened in December in Valmiera. The Executive Committee of the Soviets (Iskolat) headed by F. A. Rozin-Azis set about nationalising the land, industry and commerce.^^1^^ The revolution won quickly and bloodlessly in Byelorussia.
A different situation built up in the areas where the South-Western, Romanian and Caucasus Fronts were operating, in the Ukraine and Moldavia, on the Don, in the North Caucasus, and in Transcaucasia. Proletarian Donbass became a stronghold of the socialist revolution. In Lugansk power was transferred to the Soviets without complications.^^2^^ But in Kiev the Soviet was under the influence of Russian and Ukrainian Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Only on November 1, after a strike of the workers of the Arsenal and other factories, and after three days' stubborn fighting led by the Revolutionary Committee was the resistance of the Provisional Government's troops broken. But the fruits of the victory were exploited by the bourgeois-nationalist Central Rada (Council) which seized power on November 7 (20) and proclaimed a Ukrainian People's Republic. It developed a struggle against the Soviets, and began to prepare for war against Soviet Russia in alliance with the Russian and foreign capitalist classes.
The Congress of Soviets of the Ukraine convened at the beginning; of December in Kiev was dispersed by the Rada. The more than 120' delegates then moved to Kharkov, where the 1st All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets was held on December 11 and 12 (24 and 25). It declared the creation of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic as a federated, part of Soviet Russia, and extended operation of the decrees of Soviet power to the Ukraine. The first Soviet Government of the Ukraine, thePeople's Secretariat, was headed by a prominent Bolshevik, F. A. Sergeyev (Artem), and included V. P. Zatonsky, N. A. Skrypnik and others. The Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR welcomed the Soviet statehood of the Ukrainians and promised "the new government of the fraternal republic full support of every kind in the struggle for peace and in the transfer of all land, factories and banks tov the working people of the Ukraine".^^1^^
In January 1918 the Kiev Soviet, together with the works committees and trade unions, called the workers to a new armed insurrection. Only after many days' stubborn street fighting against nationalist troops and Cossacks did the Soviet troops and the workers' squads restore Soviet power in Kiev on January 26 (February 8). The Central Rada fled and by the end of February worker and peasant, power had been established throughout the Ukraine.
In Moldavia, where there was almost no factory proletariat, Soviet power was established at the end of 1917 and early 1918 as a result of the revolutionary forces' fight against bourgeois nationalists. But in January Bessarabia (western part of Moldavia) was invaded? and occupied by Romanian troops.
On the Don, where the Cossacks constituting less than half of thepopulation owned 85 per cent of the land and enjoyed other privileges,. a Don Military Government headed by Ataman A. M. Kaledin had already been formed in May 1917. Immediately after the October Revolution Kaledin raised an anti-Soviet mutiny, and the Don soon became a national counter-revolutionary centre. All the enemies of Soviet power began to gather there: Generals M. V. Alexeyev, L. G. Kornilov and A. I. Denikin who formed a triumvirate, the Octobrist M. V. Rodzyanko, the Cadets P. N. Milyukov and P. B. Struve, and the Socialist-Revolutionary B. V. Savinkov. A whiteguard Volunteer Army was being formed in Novocherkassk. Only after stubborn armed struggle did the revolutionary troops advancing from the Donbass and supported by uprisings of workers and the poorer Cossacks defeat the Don counter-revolution and liberate Novocherkassk and Rostov. Kaledin shot himself, Kornilov was killed and the Volunteer Army retreated to the Kuban. In March 1918 a Don Soviet Republic was established.
~^^1^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, pp. 245-46.
~^^1^^ The Struggle for Soviet Power in the Baltic Area, Moscow, 1967, pp. 130-31, 139-41, 149-54, 319-25 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ K.E. Voroshilov, "From the Recent, Infinitely Remote Past", October 1917. A Collection of Articles and Reminiscences, Rostov-on-Don, 1921, p. 62 (in Russian).
CHAPTER TWO
VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
81In the Caucasus the revolution developed in a complicated situation of mixed social relations and a multinational population. In Baku (Azerbaijan), a major proletarian centre, Bolsheviks, against the resistance of Mensheviks, Right Socialist-Revolutionaries -and bourgeois nationalists, achieved a proclamation of Soviet power at a session of the Baku Soviet. On November 2 (15) a new executive -committee of the Soviet was elected, headed by S. G. Shahumyan. However, both in Baku and even more so in other parts of the Caucasus, the Mensheviks (especially in Georgia), Socialist-- Revolutionaries, and bourgeois nationalist organisations (Armenian Dashnaks, Azerbaijani Musavatists) continued fierce resistance. In Tiflis ( Georgia) they succeeded in disbanding the Assembly of the Garrison Delegates which supported the Bolsheviks, seized the arsenal, and set up their own government, the Transcaucasian Commissariat. Except in Baku, power in Transcaucasia proved to be in the hands of bourgeois nationalist organisations which received support from the imperialists of Great Britain and the USA. In the North Caucasus, after a tense struggle, a Terek People's Republic was proclaimed in Pyatigorsk in the spring of 1918.
In Turkestan, one of the most backward periphery areas of Russia, the role of the Russian proletarian part of the population proved particularly decisive. The main stronghold of the revolutionary struggle was Tashkent, a working-class centre in the midst of the masses of the peasant population who were under the influence of reactionary bais (rich landowners) and the Muslim clergy. In response to an attempt by the bourgeois authorities to disarm the soldiers of the garrison, an armed insurrection broke out in Tashkent on 28 October .(November 10). After four days' fighting power passed to the Soviet. In November a Turkestan Council of People's Commissars was formed, headed by the Bolshevik F. I. Kolesov. Soviet power was established comparatively quickly in 2 major cities, Samarkand and Ashkhabad. However, in the Kokand, Jetysu (Seven Rivers) and other areas the establishment of Soviet power met with stubborn resistance and dragged on.
In the proletarian centre of Siberia, Krasnoyarsk, Soviet power was proclaimed on 29 October (November 11) 1917. During November it was established in Irkutsk, Omsk and other cities, and in March 1918 reached Kamchatka.
The swift advance of Soviet power from the shores of the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean showed that the October Revolution had deep roots among the popular masses, evoking a lively response in the hearts of millions. Above all, the success of the revolution manifested the maturity of the Russian proletariat, which marched in the vanguard of the movement, and was followed by the peasant mass in soldiers' greatcoats and sailors' pea-jackets. The working class of Russia was
able to take over leadership of the revolutionary struggle and become the driving force of the political and social transformation of the country. The agencies of revolutionary power that it created, the Soviets, consolidated the positions won.
In carrying out a socialist revolution the working class relied on an alliance with the poorest peasantry. At the same time the Bolsheviks put forward an agrarian programme that made it possible to draw the broadest sections of the country working people into the revolution. Having rallied a majority of the peasants around the proletariat, they not only won them away from the bourgeoisie but also drew them to a considerable extent from out of the influence of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. The policy of the Bolshevik Party in ethnic relations ensured Soviet power support of the oppressed nations of Russia, to whom it brought both national liberation and emancipation from exploitation.
The fact that an experienced, militant and genuinely revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks, stood at the helm of the movement was decisive for victory of the Russian Revolution. It was able to prepare the working class for victorious revolutionary battles. Drawing on the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution, it developed a strategy and tactics of struggle for socialism. The Party put forward slogans that made it clear for all working men and women that the socialist revolution and worker power would bring them immediate and tangible economic and'socio-political fruits, and save them from oppression and exploitation. The Party succeeded in uniting various revolutionary movements and all forms of popular dissatisfaction into a single stream. And in very complicated circumstances it provided bold leadership of the struggle and led the masses to victory, r The relative weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, its cowardice and political inexperience, on the one hand, and the split in the world capitalist class, absorbed in the unending war, on the other, made in Do small way for success of the Revolution. In spite of the panic calls of the Russian bourgeoisie for help, neither the Anglo-French nor the German bloc could give it immediate military support.
An essential factor in victory of the Socialist Revolution was the help of the international proletariat. Many workers from foreign countries who were in Russia at the time were directly involved in the revolutionary struggle. There were then between 2,100,000 and 2,300,000 prisoners-of-war from the Central Powers in Russia (in the central provinces and Siberia), and more than 1.5 million of them were employed on various jobs in agriculture, building and manufacturing industry (especially in the Donbass and the Urals), working side by side with the local population. They included around 500,000 Hungarians, between 400,000 and 450,000 Austrians, 200,000 to 300,000 Southern Slavs, 200,000 to 250,000 Czechs and
6-1323
82CHAPTER TWO
VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
83Slovaks, 190,000 Germans, between 120,000 and 150,000 Romanians, around 100,000 Poles, 50,000 Turks, and also Italians and other nationalities.^^1^^ In addition there were 2,800,000 refugees from Poland and the Baltics in the central provinces, and hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers from Finland, Iran, Korea, China, and other countries. This diverse mass, multilingual and motley in social composition and political mood, was involved in the revolutionary battles to one degree or another.
The Polish and Finnish internationalists took an active part in the preparations for and carrying through of the October uprising in Petrograd. Felix Dzerzhinsky and Josef Unschlicht were members of the Petrograd MRC, Julian Leshchinsky and Stanislaw Pestkowski were active in the factories, and the brothers Yukka and Eino Rahja carried out direct assignments for Lenin. The Petrograd Red Guard included Poles, Bulgarians, Czechs, Germans, Chinese, Serbs and Hungarians. The American journalists John Reed, Albert Rhys Williams and Louise Bryant sympathising with the Bolshevik cause were in the thick of events. On November 5 (18), 1917, Lenin and Sverdlov received a delegation of 300 Belgian workers from factories in Petrograd and Sestroretsk, who came with the message for the working class of Russia that "Belgian workers are wholeheartedly with them in the fight for peace and socialism".^^2^^ In December POWs, Germans, Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs and Poles, took part in a mass demonstration with slogans of peace and friendship among nations.
In the armed fighting in Moscow Poles, Hungarians, Austrians, Southern Slavs, Germans and Frenchmen took part on the side of the Revolution. Great number of POWs took part in the establishing of Soviet power in the Ukraine: Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Southern Slavs in Kiev, Hungarians, Germans, Austrians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks and Bulgarians in Odessa, Poles and Southern Slavs in Ekaterinoslav. In the Urals and Siberia the internationalists included Hungarian, Austrian and German POWs, Polish refugees and Chinese and Korean seasonal workers. In Omsk, in October 1917, Josip Broz Tito, banished from Petrograd by the Provisional Government, joined the Red Guard and carried on revolutionary work among the peasants alongside Bolsheviks. In December, former Hungarian POWs led by Karoly Ligeti telegraphed to Lenin from Omsk: "We have become allies of the Russian Revolution and are marching together with you.''^^3^^
In Petrograd, Moscow, Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Tula, Tver, Penza, Samara, Kazan, Simbirsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk and many other cities, unions of ex-POWs and committees of foreign internationalists began to be formed. They assembled in regional conferences, and in April 1918 held an All-Russia Congress of POW Social-Democrat Internationalists representing at least 100,000 members of the movement. Speakers at the meeting were the Hungarian Bela Kun, the Pole Mieczystaw Warszawski, and the Czech F. Benes. The Congress founded an International Revolutionary Socialist Organisation of Foreign Workers and Farmers which was to work hand in hand with the RCP(B). The manifesto issued by the Congress said: "We have all unanimously decided to support the Russian revolutionary government arms in hand and to put the Communism of Marx and Engels into practice.''^^1^^
The first months after the October Revolution, Lenin said in March 1918, were "a continuous triumphal march" of Soviet power because "the overwhelming majority of the population proved to be on our side, and that is why victory was achieved with such extraordinary ease". However, he continued, it should not be forgotten that after that victory the Party and the country were faced with new tasks of prodigious difficulty: tasks of internal organisation that arisefor any social revolution, and international tasks, viz., defence against imperialism and the development of ties between the Russian. Revolution and the mounting international revolution.^^2^^
BUILDING THE WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' STATE
The victory of the October Revolution radically altered the position of the working class. From an oppressed it became the ruling class, and its vanguard, the Communist Party, became a ruling party and a force guiding the buiding of a new society.
. The priority task facing the working class and Bolsheviks was to build a Soviet state, a state of a new type. The most important theoretical issues of the class essence, goals and functions of that state had been developed by Lenin on the eve of the Revolution. His main conclusion had been that the new state should be an instrument of the socialist transformation of all social relations: "The proletariat needs state power, a centralised organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population---the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians---in the work of organising a -2so~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 163.
~^^8^^ V.I. Lenin, "Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B)", Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 88-92.
6*
~^^1^^ The Internationalists. Foreign Working People---Participants in the Fight for Power of Soviets, Moscow, 1967, pp. 15, 30-33, 51 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Pravda, November 20 (December 3), 1917. * The Internationalists..., p. 122.
84CHAPTER TWO
VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
85cialist economy." The workers' party must become "the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organising their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie".^^1^^
The working class began building its state against fierce resistance by the overthrown classes. The counter-revolution not only hatched conspiracies and raised mutinies, but also organised sabotage by civil servants and officialdom so as to paralyse business and disrupt delivveries of food to the industrial centres; and Soviet workers and officials were being murdered. The difficulties were made worse by the fact that the working class had no experience of public organisation and administration. It had to advance by roads not yet charted by
anyone.
A.n important issue requiring an immediate response was whether the Bolsheviks would take power alone or share it with other parties. At the 2nd All-Russia Congress of Soviets the Bolsheviks had an absolute majority, 390 of the 649 delegates.^^2^^ When some of the Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries quit the Congress as a protest against the armed insurrection and "seizure of power", the ratio was altered even further in favour of the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile a regrouping took place in the camp of the petty-bourgeois parties: the groups of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Ukrainian SocialistRevolutionaries and Internationalist Mensheviks were strengthened at the expense of the right wing.
The All-Russia Central Executive Committee elected by the Congress (the second ARCEC) was formed on a multiparty basis and included 62 Bolsheviks, 30 Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, 6 Internationalist Social-Democrats, 3 Ukrainian Socialists and one Maximalist, a total of 102. The Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov, an experienced political leader and outstanding organiser, was elected chairman on 8 (21) November, 1917. The ARCEC expanded all the time. After its merging with the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants' Deputies and incorporating representatives of the frontline soldiers, the Navy, and the trade unions, the ARCEC grew in January 1918 to 378 persons. But the Bolsheviks retained the leading position in
it.^^3^^
The Soviets themselves and the Executive Committee were also open to representatives of the parties that had walked out of the 2nd Congress, on condition that they recognised Soviet power. Although these parties took the road of open struggle against the Soviets, they
nevertheless operated legally for a long time, took part in elections, aJid had representatives on the local Soviets, and at provincial and All-Russia congresses. In the provincial congresses of Soviets in the first half of 1918 Communists and their sympathisers had 52.4 per cent of the seats, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries 16.8 per cent, Right Socialist-Revolutionaries 2.9 per cent, Mensheviks 1.1 per cent, Anarchists 0.5 per cent, other parties 3.2 and non-party 23.1 per cent.^^1^^
Lenin considered agreement of the proletarian party with the petty bourgeoisie, which constituted the majority of Russia's population, to be not only possible but also necessary. However, that was to be "agreement with the petty bourgeoisie not in the sense of a bloc for a bourgeois-democratic revolution", which, historically, would be a return to a phase already passed, "not in the sense of restricting the tasks of the socialist revolution, but exclusively in the sense of the forms of transition to socialism on the part of different sections of the petty bourgeoisie".^^2^^
Unlike the ARCEC, the Soviet government, the Council of People's Commissars (CPC), was initially one-party. Lenin became its chairman, and prominent Bolsheviks, experienced organisers, were appointed to the posts of People's Commissars and Deputy Commissars, and members of boards. Lenin said subsequently that "being the ruling party, we had inevitably to merge the Party and government leadership".^^3^^ A well-known literary critic, A.V. Lunacharsky, became People's Commissar of Public Education. Bolsheviks with military experience---V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko, P. E. Dybenko, N. V. Krylenko---became People's Commissars for the Army and Navy; L. D. Trotsky became People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, but from January 1918 G. V. Chicherin was already in charge of most ef the Commissariat's work. P. I. Stucka was appointed People's Commissar of Justice, A. G. Shlyapnikov of Labour, M. T. Elizarov of Railways, A. M. Kollontai of Public Care, J. V. Stalin of Nationalities'Affairs. Somewhat later, G. I. Petrovskywas put in charge of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and A. G. Shlichter ef the People's Commissariat of Agriculture.
Among the Bolshevik leaders there were those who advocated sharing power with petty-bourgeois parties, i.e., forming a "uniform socialist" government involving parties from the Bolsheviks to the People's Socialists. After bitter discussions, and the resignation of
~^^1^^ M.F. Vladimirsky, Soviets, Executive Committees an] Ccngresses of Soviets, 2nd issue, Moscow, 1921, p. 6 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Theses on the Tasks of the Party and the Present Situation", Collected Works, Vol. 42, 1969, p. 43.
; * V.I. Lenin, "Tenth Congress of the R.C.P.(B)", Collected Works, Vol. 32, 1975, p. 177.
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 409.
~^^2^^ Pravda, October 29 (November 11), 1917.
~^^3^^ A.I. Razgon, The ARCEC of the Soviets in the Pint Mont/is of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Moscow, 1977, pp. 26-44 (in Russian).
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VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION
87several People's Commissars, the Central Committee of the Party firmly took Lenin's stand; representatives of the petty-bourgeois parties could only join the government on the basis of their complete acceptance of the programme of Soviet power aimed at tackling the tasks of the socialist revolution.
At first, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries did not accept the Bolsheviks' proposal, desiring to avoid a decisive break with the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and other parties hostile to this programme. But agreement on a government bloc was reached in November. Soon the People's Commissariat of Agriculture was headed by the Left Socialist-Revolutionary A. L. Kolegayev; P. P. Proshyan became People's Commissar of Post and Telegraph and I. Z. Steinberg---People's Commissar of Justice. At that time a considerable part of the peasants leant towards the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the alliance of workers and poor peasants was the basis of agreement. This alliance of the two parties, Lenin considered, could be an "honest coalition" because "there is no radical divergence of interests between the wage-workers and the working and exploited peasants".^^1^^
In the multiparty ARCEC and local Soviets Lenin and the other Bolsheviks had to carry on a daily fight against the wavering of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and other parties. Though having to recognise that the Soviet Government was doing its utmost to implement the working people's democratic demands, these parties, nevertheless, not infrequently defended the enemies of the Revolution, who often draped themselves in the banner of ``democracy''. At a session of the ARCEC on November 4 (17) the Left SocialistRevolutionaries, supported by an opposition group of Bolsheviks, criticised the shutting down of several right-wing bourgeois newspapers and the decree on the press adopted by the Council of People's Commissars. Lenin's reply to them was: "We cannot provide the bourgeoisie with an opportunity for slandering us.... If we are to advance to socialism we cannot allow Kaledin's bombs to be reinforced by the bombs of falsehood.''^^2^^
An attempt to pass a vote of no confidence in the Council of People's Commissars in this connection was defeated. At a session of the Petrograd Soviet with frontline representatives Lenin rejected the attempts of the conciliators to prevent the arrest of saboteurs, saying: "Indeed, we have made arrests; today we arrested the director of the State Bank. We are accused of resorting to terrorism, but we
have not resorted, and I hope will not resort, to the terrorism of the French revolutionaries who guillotined unarmed men.''^^1^^
The Cadet Party became the soul and active organiser of the bourgeois counter-revolution. The ministers of the overthrown Provisional Government consolidated their old ties with the embassies and missions of the Entente. On November 28 (December 11), the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks held a not very big, but noisy anti-Soviet demonstration. Armed mutineers wanted to seize the Taurida Palace. The CPC responded by passing a decision on the arrest of the leaders of civil war against the Revolution. The Cadet Party was declared a party of enemies of the people, and the members of its leading bodies were subject to arrest and trial by revolutionary tribunals. Explaining the need for this measure at the session of the ARCEC, Lenin stressed that "the Kaledinite bourgeois elements have started a civil war". He then said: "When a revolutionary class is fighting the propertied classes that offer resistance, the resistance must be crushed. And we shall crush the resistance of the propertied classes, using the same means as they used to crush the proletariat--- no other means have been invented".^^2^^
However, the revolutionary agencies of coercion that the Soviet Government had to build up were fundamentally new. The police, army and judicial apparatus of the bourgeois-landowner state, designed for suppressing the working people, could not be employed, and were disbanded. In their place new machinery of the proletarian state was being created. Everywhere the Soviets formed a standing workers' militia and put it in charge of preserving revolutionary order. In November a decree was issued on the organisation of a new judicial system which involved direct democratic election of judges with the right to recall them and open court proceedings with the right of the accused to defence. Revolutionary tribunals were instituted to hear the cases of counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs.
On December 7 (20) a special body to fight counter-revolution was set up, the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). It was headed by a courageous revolutionary, Felix Dzerzhinsky, one of Lenin's closest associates. Party organisations and trade unions detached some of the best of their cadres, workers and seamen, to work under the Commission. Already in its first weeks of operation the Cheka had unearthed several anti-Soviet conspiracies, traced links between foreign embassies (American, French) and the conspirators, and wiped out several anarchist bands. The Cheka, Lenin said later, "was our
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Extraordinary All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Peasants' Deputies", "Alliance Between the Workers and the Working and Exploited Peasants", Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 331-33.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Meeting of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, November 4 (17), 1917", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 285.
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Speech at a Joint Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and Delegates from the Fronts, November 4 (17), 1917", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 294.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Meeting of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, December 1(14), 1917", Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 353, 354.
88CHAPTER TWO
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89>
effective weapon against the numerous plots and numerous attacks on Soviet power made by people who were infinitely stronger than
us".^^1^^
The Cheka combined implacability toward the enemies of the Revolution with humanity. In his instructions to his men Dzerzhinsky wrote: "The invasion of a private flat by armed people and deprivation of guilty people of their freedom are an evil to which we still have to resort at the present time so that goor^^1^^ and truth can prevail. But it must always be remembered that it i an evil, and that our job, in employing this evil, is to eradicate the need to resort to this means in the future. Therefore let all those who are ordered to carry out a search, deprive a person of his liberty and hold him in prison display care for the people arrested and searched, let them be much more courteous with them than even with their own relatives, remembering that the person deprived of liberty cannot defend himself and that he is in our power. Each of us must remember also that he is a representative of Soviet power, of the workers and peasants, and that any bawling, rudeness, impropriety and discourtesy, is a blot that will stain this power.''^^2^^
The Communist Party had to organise defence of the new Republic against external and internal enemies. It realised that the defence against the attacks of internal counter-revolution and international imperialism would be impossible by merely the available forces of the worker Red Guard. It was also impossible to count on the old army. Although it numbered 7 million, it was not an efficient fighting force: the soldiers, exhausted by almost four years of imperialist war, were dispersing to their homes. The Party had to build armed forces of the proletarian state. Marxists had not posed this problem previously, even in theory. The programmes of Social-Democratic Parties demanded the abolition of standing armies and their replacement by universal arming of the people.
In the new circumstances it was concluded that the proletarian state had to create its own armed organisation. On January 15 (28), 1918, the Soviet Government decreed the organisation of a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. It was to be built as a class army, and to be composed of "the most class-conscious and organised elements of the masses of the working people".^^3^^ Such an army could only be built, to begin with, on a voluntary basis. In view of the soldiers' and all working people's utter fatigue from the war, the Party
called into the Red Army only those who volunteered to take up defence of socialist revolution and proletarian state, primarily workers. Meantime, the counter-revolutionaries hatched revolts. Their leaders (from the overthrown Kerensky and Atamans Kaledin and Dutov to the Cadet Milyukov, the Socialist-Revolutionary Chernov, and the Menshevik Tsereteli) used the call for a Constituent Assembly as a cover. The same politicians who had been in power before the October Revolution and had put off the elections when they headed the Commission on elections for the Constituent Assembly, now set up a Union to Defend the Constituent Assembly when the Council of People's Commissars had decided to hold them on the date the Provisional Government had pet, viz., November 12. Their idea was simple: to counterpose the Assembly to the Soviets, to get a majority in the Assembly, and then, with its aid, to finish with Soviet power.
As was to be expected, the results of the elections to the Assembly did not reflect the radical change that had taken place in the country. They were carried out according to party ballots drawn up before October. Thus, voters balloted for a single Socialist-Revolutionary ticket, although that party had split, with its Left supporting Soviet power, and the Right (predominating in the lists of candidates) itsunrelenting enemies. In many places Soviet power was only being established at the time of the elections, and in agrarian areas SocialistRevolutionary cum Menshevik land councils (zemstvos) ruled the roost. Considerable numbers of the working people, especially the peasantry, had not yet become aware of the scope and significance of the October Revolution and its decrees on peace and the land, while thedistribution of seats gave priority to agrarian areas over industrial ones. The organisation of the elections evoked thousands of complaints about the work of the electoral commissions which had been set up under the Provisional Government and which permitted many oversights and abuses.
The final results for 75 constituencies showed that more than half of the electorate went to the polls (in the capitals around 70 per cent). The bourgeois parties suffered a crushing defeat; only 17 per cent voted for them, mainly for the Cadets. But the petty-bourgeois parties (including ethnic ones), primarily the Socialist-Revolutionaries, received 59 per cent of the votes. This was evidence both of the political backwardness of the rural areas and of the influence of nationalists on the periphery of Russia, where bitter civil war soon developed.
The Bolsheviks received 24 per cent of the votes cast. In the provincial and regional centres, however, the picture was different: there the Bolsheviks led with 36.5 per cent, the Cadets received 23.9* per cent, the Socialist-Revolutionaries 14.5 per cent, and the Men-
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Ninth All-Russia' Congress of Soviets", Collected Works, Vol. 33
p. 175.
~^^2^^ From the History of the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission. 1917-1921. A Collection of Documents, Moscow, 1958, pp. 103-04 (in Russian).
~^^8^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, p. 356.
•90
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91sheviks 5.8 per cent. In the army 40.9 per cent voted for the Bolsheviks (61 per cent on the Northern Front, 67 per cent on the Western Front, 57.7 per cent in the Baltic Fleet), 38.4 per cent for the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and 1.3 per cent for the Cadets. In the garrisons of the rear 57.8 per cent voted for the Bolsheviks. In the major centres they had an overall majority (population and garrison combined). In Petrograd and Moscow, for example, they received 46.4 per cent of the vote, but in their garrisons more than 70 per cent. There was a similar situation in Tver, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, Revel, etc.^^1^^ It is noteworthy that in constituencies where the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries ran on separate ballots "they received more votes than the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries (in Petrograd 150,000 and less than 5,000 respectively, in the Baltic Fleet more than 30,000 against around 14,000).a For the country as a whole, however, there was not, as Lenin remarked, "even a formal correspondence between the will of the mass of the electors and the composition of the elected Constituent Assembly".^^3^^
The Constituent Assembly lagged behind historic developments. Its role had already been essentially played by the Second AllRussia Congress of Soviets, which had immediately decided the key issues, viz., peace, the land and the establishment of worker and peasant power. It had decided them, moreover, more rapidly and businesslike than any bourgeois parliament had ever decided such matters. There was no objective necessity for a Constituent Assembly any longer. But many peasants and some workers still believed in it and saw in it a ``national'' representation. Only the convening of the Constituent Assembly and open, public comparison of its programme with that of the Soviet authorities could help the masses get rid of their parliamentary illusions and convince them from their own experience that Soviet power expressed their main hopss and demands
better.
In early January Lenin drafted a Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People which, declaring Russia a Republic •of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, summed up the people's main gains since the October Revolution. Intended to be presented to the Constituent Assembly as a draft resolution, the Declaration said in conclusion: "Supporting Soviet power and the de>crees of the Council of People's Commissars, the Constituent Assembly considers that its own task is confined to establishing the funda-
~^^1^^ O.N. Znamensky, The All-Russia Constituent Assembly. History of Its • Convening and Political Collapse, Leningrad, 1976, pp. 260-78 (in Russian)
~^^2^^ K.V. Gusev, Kh.A. Eritsian, From Conciliation to Counter-Revolution, Moscow, 1968, p. 436 (in Russian).
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "Theses on the Constituent Assembly", Collected Works, Vol. 26,
ip. 380.
mental principles of the socialist reconstruction of society.''^^1^^ The Declaration was adopted by a majority of votes at a session of the ARCEC on January 3 (16), 1918, with two against and one abstention. The next day it was published in the press.
On the day of the opening of the Constituent Assembly, January 5 (18), the counter-revolutionary parties and organisations got ready to hold an armed demonstration in front of the Taurida Palace under the slogan "All Power to the Constituent Assembly!", calculating to turn it into an uprising and to seize the Smolny. But the mood of the masses, and the measures taken by the Soviet authorities, forced the organisers to abandon their intention. The demonstration, in which there were almost no workers or soldiers, passed off without spirit, attempts at provocation were put a stop to.
The composition of those attending the session of the Constituent Assembly was roughly as follows: 259 Socialist-Revolutionaries, 136 Bolsheviks, 40 Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, 13 Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries, 5 Mensheviks, and 10 representatives of minor parties. The Cadet deputies did not register.^^2^^ The session was opened in the name of the ARCEC by Sverdlov, who read out the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People and moved its adoption. The Socialist-Revolutionary V. M.Chernov was elected chairman of the Assembly by the votes of the Socialist-- Revolutionaries. He and other speakers tried to proclaim the Assembly the supreme power in the country and argued against discussing the Declaration. It is noteworthy, however, that the enemies of the Revolution could not avoid recognising that the transfer of all the land to the people's possession was irreversible, and could not ignore the demand for a universal democratic peace (although they tried to make it dependent on the Entente Powers). They were also forced to agree with the formation of a federal republic (but not, needless to say, a Soviet one). "What Chernov prattled about," wrote Pravda, "was, in fact, a complete yielding (verbally, of course) to the Soviet platform: here and now peace, and land, and workers' control."3 When there were no hopes left of real recognition of Soviet power and its gains by the Assembly, a statement by the Bolshevik group, drafted by Lenin, was made public in the early hours of the morning: "Refusing for a single moment to cover up the crimes of the enemies of the people, we make this announcement of our withdrawal from the Constituent Assembly, leaving it to Soviet power to take the final decision on the attitude to the counter-revolutionary section of the Constituent Assembly.''^^4^^ An hour later, the Left Socialist-
^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 425.
2 O IV 7 no.-------ol,,, ... •• ------•
O.N. Znamensky, op. cit., pp. 331-41.
~^^3^^ Prai'da, January 7 (20), 1918.
~^^4^^ V.I. Lenin, "Declaration of the R.S.D.L.P. (Bolsheviks) Group at the
92CHAPTER TWO
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93Revolutionaries condemned the majority's intention to take the road of fighting Soviet power and also left the Assembly. At 4.00 a.m. the commander of the guard of the Taurida Palace, the seaman A. G. Zheleznyakov, sxiggested to the chairman Chernov, "that everyone present quit the conference hall because the guard is tired".1 On the night of January 6 (19), 1918, the ARCEC issued a decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly.^^2^^
In spite of various inventions still employed by Western authors that the Bolsheviks used force to break up the Constituent Assembly, it in fact buried itself politically when it went against the wil of the people and turned itself into a cover of bourgeois counterrevolution striving to overthrow the power of the Soviets. At a session of the ARCEC Lenin said: "The people wanted the Constituent Assembly summoned, and we summoned it. But they sensed immediately what this famous Constituent Assembly really was. And now we have carried out the will of the people, which is---All power to the Soviets!''^^3^^ Resolutions were adopted at numerous meetings approving dissolution of the Assembly. More than two years later Lenin again remarked that the workers, soldiers and peasants in Russia had been "exceptionally well prepared to accept the Soviet system and to disband the most democratic of bourgeois parliaments".^^4^^
Soviet government, which false defenders of democracy have accused of ignoring and suppressing ``freedoms'', in fact carried out vast democratic reforms in the very first months after the October Revolution, such as had not been tackled in the eight months when the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties had been in office.
All the anti-democratic institutions inherited from tsarism were eradicated root and branch. The division into estates of the realm, titles and privileges were abolished, the inequality of women in all spheres of public affairs was lifted, freedom of marriage and divorce was established, freedom of conscience was proclaimed, the Church was separated from the state, and the schools were freed from the tutelage of the Church. Demands were thus met that had long been made by bourgeois democracy, but which had never been carried out anywhere so fully and to such an extent. At the end of December 1917, Lenin wrote: "In a matter of weeks the undemocratic institu-
Constituent Assembly Meeting, January 5 (18), 1918", Collected Works, Vol. 26,
p. 430.
~^^1^^ The All-Russia Constituent Assembly, Moscow-Leningrad, 1930, pp. 109,
110, 112-13 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, pp. 335-36.
~^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "Speech on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly Delivered to the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, January 6 (19), 1918", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 440.
~^^4^^ V.I. Lenin, <ilLeft-Wing' Communism---an Infantile Disorder", Collected Works, Vol. 31, 1974, pp. 59-60.
tions in the army, the countryside and industry have been almost completely destroyed. There is no other way---there can be no other way---to socialism save through such destruction.''^^1^^
But Soviet power was not limited to that. At the same time, and to no less an extent, it manifested its real democratic nature: conditions were provided to develop the "independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work, ... [in] the independent creation of a new life," and in the competition "in which talented organisers should come to the fore in practice and be promoted to work in state administration".^^2^^
The very first appeal of the Council of People's Commissars to the public said: "Comrades, working people! Remember that now you ^ourseZwsareatthehelmof thestate. No one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take into your hands all affairs of the state. Your Soviets are from now on the organs of state authority, legislative bodies with full powers.
``Rally around your Soviets. Strengthen them. Get on with the job yourselves; begin right at the bottom, do not wait for anyone."3 The best representatives of the working class became members of Soviet administration. Many of them already had some experience of administrative work in the Soviets, trade unions, and workers' control agencies before the Revolution. Workers formed the core of the various People's Commissariats---of Foreign Affairs, Railways, Labour, and Internal Affairs---that replaced dissolved ministries. Among the first on staff of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, for example, were Bolshevik workers from the Siemens-- Schuckert works on Vasilyevski Island in Petrograd. The first staff members of the People's Commissariat of Labour were chemical workers from the Urals and people from the metal workers' trade union, and its board also included representatives of the textile workers' and tanners' unions.
Workers constituted the largest group among the delegates to the supreme body, the All-Russia Congress of Soviets. In the 3rd and 4th Congresses, convened in 1918, for example, they on the average accounted for 39.6 per cent. The high proportion of workers in the system of Soviets, especially in its upper echelons, was partly due to the fact that, following the practice established before the October Revolution, the deputies to city Soviets were elected on the production principle---at mills, factories and other work places. Rela-
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Fear of the Collapse of the Old and the Fight for the New", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 400.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "How to Organise Competition?", Collected Works, Vol. 26, PP. 409, 415.
^^3^^ V.I. Lenin, "To the Population", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 297.
94CHAPTER TWO
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95-
lively more representatives of city Soviets than peasant ones were delegated to congresses.
The leading role of the working class as the most class-conscious and staunchest fighter for socialism was ensured by a preponderance of representatives of its vanguard, the Communist Party, in-the Soviets. In 1918, Communists and their supporters were 71.9 per cent of the delegates to All-Russia Congresses,^^1^^ 52.4 per cent to provincial congresses in the first half of the year and 90,3 per cent in the second half, and to rural congresses 48.4 and 72.8 per cent respectively.2 The Communist Party soon formulated the principle of leadership of the agencies of state authority as follows: "The Party should carry out its decisions through Soviet bodies, within the context of the Soviet Constitution. The Party strives to guide the activity of Soviets, but not to replace them.''^^3^^
One of the most complicated problems in building the proletarian state was that of creating administrative bodies. Both before and in the early days after the October Revolution, anti-Soviet forces placed great hopes in the proletariat's lack of knowledge and experience of administration. They taunted the Bolsheviks that the socialist revolution was doomed because the proletariat would not know how to govern the state. Lenin called it an absurd and scurrilous prejudice, the idea spread by the exploiters that only the upper classes, only the rich, could govern the state. But he did not underestimate the difficulties connected with sabotage by old officials and some of the intelligentsia, the workers' lack of the necessary skills and even, not infrequently, of elementary literacy, because tsarism and the bourgeoisie had barred them from education.
The training of personnel on a national scale in schools and colleges needed time. So there was only one way out---to teach workers and peasants the art of administration in practical work, without the fear of possible mistakes. Lenin later wrote that "among the rank-and-file workers and peasants there are very many people devoted to the interests of the working masses and capable of undertaking the work of leadership. Among them there are many with a talent for organisation and administration, to whom capitalism gave no opportunity and whom we are helping and must help in every way to come to the fore and take up the work of building socialism.''^^4^^
The results of the first months of building the workers' and peasants' state were summed up by the 3rd Congress of Soviets in January 1918. The merging of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies had by then been completed, which reflected the strengthening of the alliance of the working class and the labouring peasantry. The Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People that the Constituent Assembly had refused to consider. In his report on the work of the CPC, Lenin remarked: "I have no illusions about our having only just entered the period of transition to socialism, about not yet having reached socialism. But if you say that our state is a socialist Republic of Soviets, you will be right.''^^1^^ Sovereignty of the Soviets was a most important principle of the state system. "The democratism of Soviet power and its socialist nature," Lenin wrote, "are expressed in the fact
``that the supreme state authority is vested in the Soviets, which, are made up of representatives of the working people (workers, soldiers and peasants), freely elected and removable at any time by the masses hitherto oppressed by capital;
``that the local Soviets freely amalgamate on a basis of democraticcentralism, into a single federal union as represented by the Soviet state power of the Russian Soviet Republic;
``that the Soviets concentrate in their hands not only the legislative power and supervision of law enforcement, but direct enforcement of the laws through all the members of the Soviets with a viewto a gradual transition to the performance of legislative functions and state administration by the whole working population.''^^2^^
In that description one can clearly trace the link between the plans Lenin expressed on the eve of the October Revolution drawing on the experience of the Paris Commune (especially in The State and Revolution) and the realities that were taking shape in Soviet Russia. Not only was the elective nature of all Soviets of great importance but also the electors' right to recall their delegates. Lenin considered that right a fundamental tenet of genuine democracy, all but forgotten by bourgeois parliamentarians. Already on November 21 (December 4), 1917, the ARCEC issued a special decree granting congresses of Soviets the right to schedule re-elections to all representative institutions, and obliging the Soviets to schedule re-elections on the demand of more than half of the electorate.^^3^^
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 464.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Democratism and Socialist Nature of Soviet Power",. Collected Works, Vol. 42, 1969, p. 100.
^^3^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, pp. 116-19.
~^^1^^ G.A. Trukan, The Working Class in the Struggle fcr the Victory and Consolidation of Soviet Power, Moscow, 1975, pp. 190, 191 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Five Years of Soviet Power, Moscow, 1922, p. 89 (in Russian).
~^^3^^ The CPSU in Resolutions of Congresses, Conferences and CC Meetings, Vol. 2, Moscow, 1970, p. 77 (in Russian).
~^^4^^ V.I. Lenin, "The Workers' State and Party Work", Collected Works, Vol. 30, 1977, p. 64.
-96
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97The Soviet system replaced the bureaucratic centralism of the bourgeois state by democratic centralism, whereby leadership from one centre and subordination of the local bodies to the centre were combined with broad initiative and independence of local Soviets in managing local affairs. "We are for democratic centralism," Lenin wrote. "And it must be clearly understood how vastly different democratic centralism is from bureaucratic centralism on the one hand, and from anarchism on the other... Centralism, understood in a truly democratic sense, presupposes the possibility, created for the first time in history, of a full and unhampered development not only of specific local features, but also of local inventiveness, local initiative, of diverse ways, methods and means of progress to the common goal.''^^1^^
The Soviet state was built on a multinational basis. The 2nd All-Russia Congress of Soviets guaranteed "all the nations inhabiting Russia the genuine right to self-determination".^^2^^ The basic principles of the Soviet ethnic-state structure were laid down in the Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia, and in the Appeal to the Working Muslims of Russia and the East. The latter said: "Henceforth your faith and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared free and inviolable. You will arrange your national affairs freely and unhindered. You have the right to that. Know that your rights, like those of all the nations of Russia, are protected by the whole might of the Revolution and its agencies, the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies.''^^3^^
The principles proclaimed were strictly implemented. Although the counter-revolutionary Ukrainian Central Rada had seized power in the Ukraine, the Soviet Government declared in December 1917 that it recognised "the People's Ukrainian Republic, and its right to secede from Russia or enter into a treaty with the Russian Republic of federal or similar relations between them".^^4^^ When the Seim of the Finnish bourgeois republic adopted the Declaration of the Independence of Finland the Soviet Government recognised its state independence in a decree of December 18 (31), 1917, and Lenin personally handed the decree to the Prime Minister, P. E. Svinhufvud who came to Petrograd. Shortly afterwards the Government of the RSFSR by a special decree repudiated all treaties and acts concluded by the former government of the Russian Empire
on the partition of Poland "in view of their contradiction to the principle of self-determination of nations and the revolutionary sense of justice of the Russian people who recognise the Polish people's inalienable right to independence and unity.''^^1^^ That laid a firm legal and political foundation for the restoration of the independence of Poland.
Recognition of the right to self-determination, including freedom to secede, did not in the least exclude but rather presumed Communists' conviction of the need for a voluntary union of the liberated nations. The principle of federation became a sure step toward a stable association of the various nationalities of Russia in a single, democratic, centralised Soviet state. When in December 1917 the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets declared the Ukraine a Soviet republic as a "federated part of the Russian Republic"^^2^^, that was the first concrete decision about a Soviet Federation as the form of constitutional structure of the socialist multinational state.
The Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 legislated that "the Soviet Russian Republic is established on the basis of a free union of free nations, as a federation of Soviet national republics." This was developed in a resolution on the federal institutions of the Russian Republic, which noted that future members of the Federation would be given representation at All-Russia Congresses of Soviets, in the ARCEC, and in the central government, the Council of People's Commissars.^^3^^ Speaking at the Congress about the new revolutionary federation, Lenin stressed: "We do not rule by dividing, as ancient Rome's harsh maxim required, but by uniting all the working people with the unbreakable bonds of living interests and a sense of class. This our union, our new state is sounder than power based on violence which keeps artificial state entities hammered together with lies and bayonets in the way the imperialists want them---This federation is invincible and will grow quite freely, without the help of lies or bayonets. The laws and the state system which we are creating over here are the best earnest of its invincibility.''^^4^^
Along with the Soviet federation Soviet national autonomy was given shape, a most important constitutional form of free development and fraternal co-operation of nations and nationalities. Having adopted the course of drawing all the nationalities of the coun-
^^1^^ Documents of the Foreign Policy of the USSR, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1957, pp. 71, 458-60 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ The Formation of the USSR. A Collection of Documents, Moscow-- Leningrad, 1949, p. 74 (in Russian).
~^^8^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, pp. 341, 350. ~^^4^^ V.I. Lenin, "Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies", Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 480-81.
7-1323
~^^1^^ V.I. Lenin, "Original Version of the Article 'The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government'", Collected Works, Vol. 27, 1965, pp. 207, 208.
~^^2^^ V.I. Lenin, "Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets...", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 247.
~^^8^^ Decrees of the Soviet Government, Vol. I, pp. 113-14. ~^^4^^ V.I. Lenin, "Manifesto to the Ukrainian^^1^^ People with an Ultimatum to the Ukrainian Rada", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 361.
98CHAPTER TWO
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99try into the stream of general democratic and socialist reforms, Soviet government took into account the concrete conditions of the historical development of each nation and nationality, and the level of economic, political and cultural development they had reached. In the autonomous national republics, all administrative, cultural and political activity was aimed to intreduce the local population gradually to active involvement in administration, with due account for local traditions and customs.
On April 30, 1918 the Fifth All-Turkestan Congress of Soviets in Tashkent resolved to form a Turkestan Soviet Republic as an autonomous part of the Russian Soviet Federation. The Turkestan Autonomous Republic itself was multinational: its population consisted of Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kirghizes, Tajiks, Turkmens, and Kara-Kalpaks. The Congress elected a CEC of Turkestan headed by an old Bolshevik, P. A. Kobozev, which for the first time included representatives of the indigenous nationalities.
The policy of the Bolsheviks in ethnic relations and the fraternal, selfless aid of the Russian workers to all the nations of Russia set the stage for restructuring all social relations on a basis of friendship of nations and proletarian internationalism. However, national hostility, distrust and enmity propagated and fanned for ages by the exploiters could not be vanquished immediately. Time and no little effort were needed to root out both Great Russian chauvinism and local nationalism.
In March 1918, elaborating on important matters of the constitutional system, Lenin said at the Seventh Congress of the RCP(B): "When the workers set up their own state they realised that the old concept of democracy---bourgeois democracy---had been surpassed in the process of the development of our revolution. We have arrived at a type of democracy that has never existed anywhere in Western Europe. It had its prototype only in the Paris Commune.''^^1^^
While stressing that only the first steps had been taken toward passing to socialism, Lenin saw the state of a new type as the main accomplishment made so far on that road: "Despite all the crudity and lack of discipline that exists in the Soviets---this is a survival of the petty-bourgeois nature of our country---despite all that the new type of state has been created by the masses of the people.... Soviet power is a new type of state without a bureaucracy, without police, without a regular army, a state in which bourgeois democracy has been replaced by a new democracy, a democracy that brings to the fore the vanguard of the working people, gives them legisla-
tive and executive authority, makes them responsible for military defence and creates state machinery that can re-educate the masses.''^^1^^
At the same time he warned against running ahead and prematurely proclaiming the withering away of the state (that "would distort the historical perspective"), and against including a description of the socialist system in its developed form, i.e. communism, in the Party Programme ("the bricks of which socialism will be composed have] not yet been made").
The Soviet system was ratified by the Constitution of the RSFSR adopted on July 10, 1918 by the Fifth All-Russia Congress of Soviets. This was the first constitution in history stipulating that "power must belong wholly and exclusively to the working masses and their plenipotentiary representatives---the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies" (Article 7). This Constitution, Lenin noted, "was not drawn up in a study, and was not foisted on the working people by bourgeois lawyers. No, this Constitution grew up in the course of the development of the class struggle in proportion as class contradictions matured.''^^2^^ It confirmed the transfer of the main means of production to people's ownership, and the free union and equal rights of all races and nationalities, and guaranteed freedom of association, meeting, conscience and the press. But unlike bourgeois constitutions it switched the centre of gravity from formal recognition of freedom and equality to actually guaranteeing democracy and freedom for the broad masses of the working people previously deprived of them.
. While formulating and consolidating the general principles of the new, proletarian democracy, the Soviet Constitution at the same time reflected certain specific features of the revolution in Russia. The exceptionally sharp class struggle and the fierce resistfance of the overthrown classes called for restrictions on the rights j0f the non-working groups of the population: the exploiter elements '(2 to 3 per cent of the adult population) were deprived of the fran<fchise; the working class was given priority in the representation in the Soviets and their congresses; multi-stage elections and open voting by show of hands were practised. Lenin considered these features to be temporary, and not necessarily applicable in other countries.^^3^^
The Constitution of the RSFSR gave the structure of Soviet government the necessary integral shape. The ideas of people's $ower, proletarian democracy and internationalism permeated aD
\ Ibid., p. 133.
~^^1^^ V.L Lenin, "Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.), Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 126.
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KautskyV,
p. 256.
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