april theses speech

April Theses

Vladimir lenin, the tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution. april 17, 1917.

Original Source: Pravda, 20 April 1917.

 I arrived in Petrograd only on the night of April 16, and could therefore, of course, deliver a report at the meeting on April 17, on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only upon my own responsibility, and with the reservations as to insufficient preparation.

The only thing I could do to facilitate matters for myself and for honest opponents was to prepare written theses. I read them, and gave the text to Comrade Tseretelli. I read them very slowly, twice: first at the meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

I publish these personal theses with only the briefest explanatory comments, which were developed in far greater detail in the report.

1. In our attitude towards the war, which also under the new government of L’vov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession must be made to “revolutionary defensism.”

The class conscious proletariat could consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defensism, only on condition: (a) that the power of government pass to the proletariat and the poor sections of the peasantry bordering on the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not only in word; (c) that a complete and real break be made with all capitalist interests.

In view of the undoubted honesty of the broad strata of the mass believers in revolutionary defensism, who accept the war as a necessity only and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary very thoroughly, persistently and patiently to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic, non-coercive peace without the overthrow of capital.

The widespread propaganda of this view among the army on active service must be organized…

2. The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that it represents a transition from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power into the hands of the bourgeoisie – to the second stage, which must place power into the hands of the proletariat and the poor strata of the peasantry.

This transition is characterized, on the one hand, by a maximum of freedom (Russia is now the freest of the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence in relation to the masses, and, finally, by the unreasoning confidence of the masses in the government of capitalists, the worst enemies of peace and socialism.

This specific situation demands of us the ability to adapt ourselves to the specific requirements of Party work among unprecedented large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.

3. No support must be given to the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises must be explained, particularly those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure, and not the unpardonable, illusion- breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.

4. The fact must be recognized that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, and so far in a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and convey its influence to the proletariat …

It must be explained to the masses that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic and persistent explanation of the errors of their (the non-Bolshevik socialists) tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticizing and explaining errors and at the same time advocate the necessity of transferring the entire power of state to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the masses may by experience overcome their mistakes.

5. 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 Laborers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.

Abolition of the police, the Army and the bureaucracy.

The salaries of all officials, who are to be elected and subject to recall at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.

6. in the agrarian program the emphasis must be laid on the Soviets of Agricultural Laborers’ Deputies.

Confiscation of all landed estates.

Nationalization of all lands in the country, the disposal of the land to be put in charge of the local Soviets of Agricultural Laborers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organization of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The creation of model farms on each of the large estates… under the control of the Agricultural Laborers’ Deputies and for the public account.

7. The immediate amalgamation of all banks in the country into a single national bank, control over which shall be exercised by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

8. Our immediate task is not to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

9. Party tasks:

(a) Immediate summoning of a Party congress. (b) Alteration of the Party program, mainly:

(1) On the question of imperialism and the imperialist war; (2) On the question of our attitude towards the state and our demand for a “commune state”. (3) Amendment of our antiquated minimum program.

(c) A new name for the Party.

10. A new International. Instead of ” Social Democrats”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism … we must call ourselves a Communist Party.

Source: V. I. Lenin, Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1952), Vol. 2, pp. 3-17.

Comments are closed.

• February Revolution
• Formation of the Soviets
• April Crisis
• Revolution in the Army
• Kornilov Affair
• Bolsheviks Seize Power
• First Bolshevik Decrees
• Constituent Assembly
• Treaty of Brest Litovsk
• FOUR KINDS OF STATES
• Communist Party Building
• Economic Apparatus
• Building the Soviets
• Red Guard into Army
• State Security
• DISINTEGRATION OF THE OLD SOCIETY
• Depopulation of the Cities
• Food Supply
• Conflict with the Church
• Death of the Old Culture
• Destruction of the Left
• The Empire Falls
• CREATION OF A NEW SOCIETY
• New Letters and Dates
• Culture and Revolution
• The New Woman
• Workers Organization
• Peasant Revolution
• Organs of the Press
• Raising Socialist Youth

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The April Theses

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

Download options, in collections.

Uploaded by Pulsar152 on June 17, 2022

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

HIST362: Modern Revolutions (2022.A.01)

Enrollment options.

• Time: 86 hours
• Free Certificate

April 1917: How Lenin Rearmed

“Now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people.”

–Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution

When Bolshevik Party leader Lenin returned from exile to Petrograd on April 3, 1917—scarcely more than a month after the February revolution that overthrew Russia’s autocracy—he delivered a speech to a gathering at Bolshevik headquarters, where, according to an eyewitness, N. N. Sukhanov, he declared: “We don’t need a parliamentary republic, we don’t need bourgeois democracy. We don’t need any government except the Soviet of workers’, soldiers’, and farm-laborers’ deputies!” 1

Lenin’s speech, Sukhanov informs us, shocked not only him—a Menshevik—but also the Bolshevik party members there. “No one had ever dreamt of them [soviets] as organs of state power, and unique and lasting enduring ones besides,” he added. 2 Another eyewitness,

the Bolshevik sailor F. F. Raskolnikov, confirmed Sukhanov’s impressions, writing that among the “most responsible party workers” present at the meeting, Lenin’s speech “laid down a ‘Rubicon’ between the tactics of yesterday and those of today.” 3

Lenin’s speech, and the “Theses” he presented the next day at a party conference and in subsequent speeches and writings over the following few weeks, 4 as we shall see, reflected an entirely new approach not only to the question of state power in the Russian Revolution, but constituted an entirely different conception of state and revolution than that held by almost any other living Marxist at the time. 5

Lenin completely reoriented the Bolshevik Party and set the stage over the coming months for the Bolshevik Party’s spectacular growth in size and influence, as its call for “All Power to the Soviets” became a rallying cry for workers and soldiers throughout Russia, setting stage for a second revolution, October, that brought the working class and poor peasants to power.

That Lenin’s views were, to one degree or another, at odds—and in some cases quite sharply—with the prevailing views of most of his fellow Bolsheviks is well documented by many eyewitnesses, and can be easily traced in the published articles and letters of the time. These differences persisted in different forms throughout the revolutionary process, but the confusion in the party was clearest in the weeks immediately following the February Revolution. The party’s confusion in part derived from the way in which it was disorganized by mass arrests and severe police repression, suddenly facing the test of a revolutionary situation.

The Bolsheviks—the militant wing of the Russian socialist movement—had the deepest roots in the industrial working class of all radical parties. But the war period had decimated the party’s ranks. By the outbreak of February, the party had 24,000 members nationwide—with about 3,000 members in Petrograd, and 500 in the militant working-class Vyborg district. Most leading Bolsheviks were either in prison, Siberia, or exile. For much of the year leading up to February, there were no members of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee available in Russia. The party’s entire Petersburg Committee was arrested in January 1917, and most of the reconstituted committee was again arrested three days before the outbreak of the February Revolution, forcing the Vyborg committee to assume leadership in Petrograd. 6

But the party’s confusion in this period was also political, a product of the contradictions inherent in the pre-1917 Bolshevik program (a program Lenin had been central to developing), which was preventing party members from fully coming to terms with the unforeseen and entirely new relation of forces created by the February Revolution. 7

Leon Trotsky, writing many years later, considered Lenin’s timely intervention in this period as the key to the October Revolution’s success:

The arrival of Lenin in Petrograd . . . turned the Bolshevik party in time and enabled the party to lead the revolution to victory. Our sages might say that had Lenin died abroad at the beginning of 1917, the October revolution would have taken place “just the same.” But that is not so. Lenin represented one of the living elements of the historical process. He personified the experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of the proletariat. His timely appearance on the arena of the revolution was necessary in order to mobilize the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity to rally the working class and the peasant masses. Political leadership in the crucial moments of historical turns can become just as decisive a factor as is the role of the chief command during the critical moments of war. History is not an automatic process. Otherwise, why leaders? Why parties? Why programs? Why theoretical struggles? 8

The purpose of this article is not to recount the entire history of the revolution, but to focus on one particular question: if Lenin’s role was essential in rearming the Bolshevik Party and making it “fit” to lead the October Revolution, what prepared Lenin to break with what had been the party orthodoxy? What were the contributing factors that allowed Lenin to rearm himself in order to be in a position to rearm the party?

There were several elements to Lenin’s thinking that this article will lay out. First was Lenin’s willingness to compare theory to practice—and to reassess and make tactical, even programmatic, adjustments based on the course of real events. This has often been presented as Lenin’s willingness to blow with the prevailing winds for the purposes of expediency. 9 But in reality Lenin always considered problems from both sides—the theoretical and the practical—always with the aim of using theory as a guide to practical action. As Karl Radek put it, “Lenin’s greatness lies in the fact that he never permits himself to be blinded to a reality when it is in process of transformation, by any preconceived formula, and that he has the courage to throw yesterday’s formula overboard as soon as it disturbs his grasp of this reality.” 10

Second, the imperialist war compelled Lenin to see Russia’s revolution even more clearly than in the past as part of an international struggle for socialism. The war, in his estimation, brought the question of socialist revolution into the realm of immediate policy, rather than far-off possibility. This was for two reasons: first, the imperialist war was proof that world capitalism had reached the stage in which the productive forces had outstripped the ability of national borders to contain them, and that internationally the productive forces had reached the point where socialism could be realized in practice. Second, the imperialist war was the product and producer of deep social contradictions that would lead to an upswing of struggles internationally—of workers, and of oppressed nations and peoples—that would create the subjective basis for the revolutionary transformation of a number of countries.

Given the urgency of the impending revolutionary situation Lenin saw developing in war-torn Europe and Russia, and given the collapse of the main socialist parties into support for their “own” governments in the imperialist war, Lenin now understood the international significance of Bolshevik experience in breaking organizationally from opportunism and reformism, and the necessity of applying this experience to the socialist movement internationally .

And finally, and perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this article, in the weeks immediately prior to the outbreak of the February Revolution, Lenin completely reassessed his own views of the state. As a result of a dispute with fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin in 1916, Lenin engaged in a deep study of the writings of Marx and Engels on the origins of the state and its role under capitalism, and decided that the entire Marxist movement worldwide had distorted Marx’s teachings. This theoretical reorientation—all of which took place prior to the outbreak of the February Revolution—was essential in preparing Lenin for the leap he was soon to take.

The context

The character of the 1917 Russian Revolution was a product of the peculiarities of Russia’s development. As a latecomer to capitalism, Russia did not repeat the gradual stages of Britain’s industrial development; instead, the most modern capitalist enterprises were grafted—under the direct intervention of the state and western banks—on top of Russia’s predominantly archaic agricultural society. In Russia’s main cities modern factories, employing thousands of workers each in some cases, sprang up quickly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result was a relatively small (3–5 million) but heavily concentrated working class in a society still predominately peasant and rural in composition (150 million peasants).

The implications of these developments on the nature of the Russian Revolution were well laid out in Rosa Luxemburg’s 1906 work, The Mass Strike .

It is not the bourgeoisie that is now the leading revolutionary element, as in the earlier revolutions of the West, while the proletarian masses, disorganized among the petty bourgeoisie, furnish material for the army of the bourgeoisie, but on the contrary, it is the class-conscious proletariat that is the active and driving element, while the big bourgeois sections are partly directly counterrevolutionary, partly weakly liberal, and only rural petty bourgeoisie and the urban petty bourgeois intelligentsia are definitively oppositional and even revolutionary minded. 11

In 1917, Russia’s “peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors,” rendered Russia’s bourgeoisie politically paralyzed and Russia’s working class the only urban force capable of taking the initiative in solving the pressing needs of the peasantry. As a result, argued Trotsky, summing up the character of 1917, “In order to realize the soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war—that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development—and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalizing its decline. That is the essence of 1917.” 12

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 at first retarded the revolutionary movement in Russia, and then—as a result of the devastation and privations of the war, and the tearing of masses of peasants from the land and into soldiers’ uniforms—accelerated it.

In late February 1917, a strike of women workers over bread shortages initiated a wave of strikes and street protests in Petrograd over several days that brought down the autocratic Romanov dynasty that had ruled the country for three centuries.

The February events gave rise to two centers of power: what came to be described as “dual power.” On the one hand, workers—whose efforts had brought the tsar down—quickly moved to establish soviets, councils of workers’ delegates elected directly from the workplaces, and later from soldiers’ units. The central, leading soviet was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, led by an executive committee initially dominated by leaders of the moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks, and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR).

Simultaneously, and with the encouragement of moderate socialists, liberal bourgeois leaders from the old Duma (the sham parliament that had existed under Tsar Nicholas’s rule) hastily formed the Provisional Government. This government consisted of capitalists, lawyers, and landowners who looked with horror upon the stormy action of the masses in Petrograd and paid only lip service to the revolution in order to contain it. The Provisional Government was committed to continuing Russia’s involvement in World War I and opposed to the demands of workers and peasants. The moderate socialist parties, in turn, took a position of “revolutionary defensism,” which insisted that the overthrow of the autocracy and the establishment of a democratic Russia justified military defense of Russia against Germany.

It was clear at this stage that the soviet had almost all the power in its hands to dispose of as it pleased. The mass of workers in Petrograd looked to the soviet as an expression of their interests. The Provisional Government’s ability to rule (even its creation) rested on the assistance and acquiescence of the moderate socialists that at that point dominated the soviet. 13 The workers of Petrograd—including a good number of Bolshevik militants—who had led the strikes and street protests that brought the tsar down—were overwhelmed by a much larger mass of newly radicalized soldiers and workers who, for the time being, placed their hopes in the leadership of the moderate socialists, who in turned offered support to the Provisional Government.

The debates among the different wings of the socialist movement in Russia about the future course of the revolution now revolved around these questions: what attitude to take to the war (which still raged), to the Provisional Government (dominated by capitalist interests), and to the workers’ soviets. The answer each arrived at was driven by different estimations of the class character of the revolution, its possibilities, and its limits.

The nature of Lenin’s break

On April 4, the day after his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin wrote what became known as his “April Theses,” elaborating on a point he made in his speeches of the previous day:

The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organization 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.

A “return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies,” he argued, “would be a retrograde step.” 14

Lenin denounced the Provisional Government for its support for the war, as well as the moderate soviet leaders’ justification of the war as a “defense” of revolutionary Russia, writing that since the war “remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to ‘revolutionary defensism’ is permissible.” The only way to end the war, he wrote soon after, was through “overthrowing the power of capital,” concentrated in the Provisional Government, and “transferring state power to another class, the proletariat.” 15

In the meantime, it was impermissible for Bolsheviks to demand that the Provisional Government “ cease to be an imperialist government,” because this would breed illusions. 16 As long as the masses continued to have illusions in the Provisional Government and put its faith in the moderate soviet leaders, the immediate task was one of propaganda—to “patiently explain” to the masses the counterrevolutionary nature of the Provisional Government and the need to transfer all power to the soviets; experience would soon teach the masses of the treachery of the Provisional Government and that all power must be transferred to the soviets.

Prior to this, no Bolshevik had ever written or spoken of the coming Russian Revolution transferring class power from the bourgeoisie to the working class and poor peasants. The revolution was conceived as one in which an insurrection bringing down the tsar would be followed by, at the very least, a brief period of bourgeois rule.

Three basic concepts of the Russian Revolution

Prior to 1917, the two main trends in the Russian socialist movement, Menshevik and Bolshevik, agreed on the “bourgeois-democratic” character of the Russian Revolution, but sharply disagreed on its class content. “That our revolution is bourgeois, that it must conclude by destroying the feudal and not the capitalist order, that it can be crowned only by a democratic republic—on this, it seems, all are agreed in our party,” a young Stalin wrote in 1907. 17

The Mensheviks, however, concluded from this that the working class must ally itself with the liberal bourgeoisie. Since the revolution’s aim was the establishment of the conditions for capitalist development in a largely backward peasant economy, the working class should encourage the bourgeoisie, “in no case intimidating it by putting forward the independent demands of the proletariat.” 18 It was thus necessary for socialists to place limits on the working-class struggle so as to ensure that the bourgeoisie take its rightful place at the head of the revolution.

The Bolsheviks argued that the lateness of capitalist development in Russia rendered the bourgeoisie too weak and dependent on the semi-feudal tsarist state, too intertwined with the landowning class, and too frightened of worker and peasant revolt from below, to play a leading role.

Not frightening the bourgeoisie merely meant putting the workers’ and peasants’ faith in a class incapable of, and even opposed to, carrying through “its own” revolution. The revolution could only succeed as an insurrectionary movement led by the working class—organized as a leading and independent detachment—in alliance with the poor peasants.

But given the divergent class interests between the working class and the peasantry—the former seeking socialism, the latter land redistribution—the alliance could only be a temporary one. Hence the revolution would be accomplished through the establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”—a provisional dictatorship that would “completely crush all resistance by reaction, ensure complete freedom for election agitation, convene on the basis of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot a constituent assembly capable of really establishing the sovereignty of the people and putting into effect the minimum social and economic demands of the proletariat.” 19 As Lenin wrote in November 1905, “Purely socialist demands are still a matter of the future.” 20

Socialists, argued Lenin, could not refuse to participate in a revolutionary provisional government in order to push the revolution as far it could go. The Menshevik position, on the other hand, was that only a bourgeois government could emerge from revolution, and from that they drew contradictory conclusions: socialists should remain outside it as an “extreme revolutionary opposition.” Entering such a government might compromise socialists who could not fulfill the party’s socialist program, as well as causing “the bourgeois class to recoil from the revolution and thus diminish its sweep.” 21

Where the Mensheviks subordinated the class interests of workers to those of the liberals, Lenin repeatedly emphasized the necessity for the class independence of the working class as a condition for it being in a position to play the vanguard role in Russia’s revolution. “The Bolsheviks claimed for the proletariat the role of leader in the democratic revolution,” wrote Lenin. “The Mensheviks reduced its role to that of an ‘extreme opposition.’ . . . The Mensheviks always interpreted the bourgeois revolution so incorrectly as to result in their acceptance of a position in which the role of the proletariat would be subordinate to and dependent on the bourgeoisie.” 22

Leon Trotsky held a third position that placed him closer to Lenin and the Bolsheviks (though organizationally in this period he was closer to the Mensheviks), but took Lenin’s analysis a step further. The working class, he agreed, would play the leading role in the revolution; and it would have support of the peasantry. But the latter was incapable of playing an independent role. Having led a successful revolution against tsarism, the working class would assume direct power and be compelled to burst the framework of the bourgeois revolution and proceed to begin implementing socialist measures, whose success could only be guaranteed in the context of international revolution. “Left to its own resources,” he wrote in his 1906 work Results and Prospects, “the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counter-revolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it. It will have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule, and, hence, the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe.” 23 This prognosis, as it turned out, was the closest to predicting the actual course and outcome of the 1917 revolution.

Lenin on soviets in 1905 and 1917

After the emergence of the Petersburg Soviet in October 1905, Lenin tentatively argued in a letter to the party’s newspaper that Bolsheviks must enter and support the soviets, and that “the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should be regarded as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government .” 24 After this, Lenin and the Bolsheviks repeatedly pointed to the soviet as a potential form that could be taken by a provisional revolutionary government. 25 This should not, however, be seen as the same position Lenin took in 1917. In November 1905, Lenin makes clear that the party’s participation in what he calls “non-party” organizations (like soviets) is only “temporary,” specifically related to the necessity of joining forces for the purposes of struggle in the “democratic revolution.” 26 This is a far cry from Lenin’s positive view of soviets as the potential vehicle for proletarian rule in 1917.

A few years before the fall of the tsar, in October 1915, Lenin still considered the immediate tasks of the coming Russian revolution to be bourgeois : “The most correct slogans are the ‘three pillars’ (a democratic republic, confiscation of the landed estates and an eight-hour working day).” 27 In keeping with what he had written during and after the 1905 revolution, Lenin noted that “Sovietsof Workers’ Deputies and similar institutions must be regarded as organs of insurrection, of revolutionary rule.” 28 Soviet power, however, was still limited to the 1905 framework. At the same time, the democratic revolution in Russia is presented as the harbinger of world socialist revolution: “Thetask confronting the proletariat of Russia,” he continued, “is the consummation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia in order to kindle the socialist revolution in Europe.” 29

Before February, the Bolshevik party saw the “immediate task” to be the overthrow of tsarism and the clearing away of all feudal remnants, under a provisional revolutionary government—provisional in the strict sense of being transitory —to give way to the convocation of a constituent assembly and the establishment of a bourgeois democratic republic; only then could a fight for socialism begin. 30 In April, with tsarism already overthrown, Lenin now argued that the immediate task was to establish soviet power—not as a provisional government to clear away feudal remnants, but as a form of workers’ power that would be used to begin the process sweeping away capitalism.

The Bolshevik Party in March 1917

What were the policies pursued by the Bolsheviks before Lenin’s return? The Bolsheviks’ first measure involved attempts to press the old slogans into the new situation, and the results were varied. As outlined by historian D. A. Longley, there were essentially four positions in the Bolshevik party coming out of the February Revolution, held by four different sections of the party. 31 All of them derived, or were essentially based on, the pre-1917 Bolshevik program.

The Vyborg district Bolshevik committee, whose activists played an outsized role in the successful strikes and street actions that overthrew the tsar, called for the creation of soviets out of which should issue a “provisional revolutionary government.” Once this body was set up, they demanded, all support must be withdrawn from the Duma-created Provisional Government. They limited a future soviet-based government, however, to fulfilling the party’s minimum demands—that is, the creation of a bourgeois-democratic republic. Their approach, as Longley notes, was in accordance with party policy developed during the 1905 revolution. 32

A second position—but similar to Vyborg—was taken by the three members of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, Alexander Shliapnikov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Peter Zalutsky, who issued a manifesto against the Provisional Government, denouncing it as a government of the big bourgeoisie and the landowners, and calling for the creation of a provisional revolutionary government established by the “revolutionary insurgent peoples” that would implement the minimum program: democratic rights, confiscation of church and crown lands, the eight-hour day, and the convocation of a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage. But the Russian Bureau hit a wall when they discovered that the moderates rejected this position and were unwilling to form a government.

The Petersburg Committee, which had been devastated by arrests and had only recently been reconstituted in March—with many who had not participated in the revolution—took a more conservative line, calling for critical support for the Provisional Government, passing a March 3 resolution stating that the party would “not oppose the power of the Provisional Government in so far as its activities correspond to the interests of the proletariat and of the broad democratic masses of the people.” 33

Now that tsarism had been overthrown, some members of the Petersburg committee wanted to drop the Bolsheviks’ opposition to the war and adopt a revolutionary defensist line on the grounds that “our front must be defended against German attack.” 34 The Petersburg Committee also refused to support a Vyborg resolution in support of a strike for the eight-hour day that was now raging in Petrograd and against the Soviet Executive Committee’s call that workers return to work. 35

The situation in the party became more confused with the return from Siberian exile of Bolshevik Central Committee members Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and the former Duma deputy Matvei Muranov. They promptly took over the editorship of the Bolshevik’s paper Pravda and implemented a right turn on its pages that rendered it “in a flash,” according to Sukhanov, “unrecognizable.” 36 Kamenev’s Pravda articles called for supporting the Provisional Government for the “objectively revolutionary steps that it is compelled to take and to the extent that it actually undertakes them,” 37 and adopted the defensist position of the moderate socialists. Since the “banners” of the workers and peasants have replaced the “banner” of the tsar, and since the German masses have not yet risen up to stop the war, the “free people” of Russia must “stand firmly at their post,” replying “bullet for bullet and shell for shell,” he wrote in a lead March 15 editorial. 38

Stalin too took a stance of critical support for the Provisional Government, calling upon workers and peasants to “bring pressure on the Provisional Government to make it declare its consent to start peace negotiations immediately,” and offering critical support for an appeal “to the peoples of the world” issued by the Petrograd Soviet Executive that stated, “The Russian revolution will not retreat before the bayonets of conquerors.” 39

Shliapnikov’s memoirs report that liberal politicians and the moderate socialists were “buzzed” over the apparent triumph of the “moderate and sensible Bolsheviks” reflected in the new Pravda line, whereas “in outlying districts,” Bolshevik party members demanded that the paper’s new editors be expelled. 40

Prior to 1924, (when the campaign began against “Trotskyism” and the party leadership under the triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev began to rewrite, and later under Stalin’s dictatorship, completely doctor the history of the party) the accounts by party members of this period uniformly tell the same story and are summed up by veteran Bolshevik Michael Olminsky, who in 1921 wrote that “an obligatory premise for every member of the party, the official opinion of the party, its continual and unchanging slogan right up to the February revolution of 1917, and even some time after” was that “the coming revolution must be only a bourgeois revolution.” 41

“All the comrades before the arrival of Lenin were wandering in the dark,” remarked Bolshevik leader Ludmilla Stahl. “We know only the formulas of 1905. Seeing the independent creative work of the people, we could not teach them. . . . Our comrades could only limit themselves to getting ready for the Constituent Assembly by parliamentary means, and took no account of the possibility of going farther.” 42

In late March the Bolsheviks held a party conference whose proceedings clearly indicate the confusion that still existed in the party. Stalin, who delivered the opening report, called for critical support of the Provisional Government, describing it as the “fortifier of the conquests of the revolutionary people” (that in an unspecified time in the future would become “an organ for organizing the counterrevolution”). Throughout the discussion, many delegates spoke of “support insofar as,” exercising “control” over the government, making “demands” on it, and so on.

Only a handful of Bolsheviks argued differently: “The government is not fortifying but checking the course of the revolution,” argued N. Skrypnik. After a speech by a nonparty social democrat M. Steklov on the activities of the Provisional Government (which was not recorded), its counterrevolutionary nature had become so clear to the delegates that Stalin put forward a motion to drop from the resolution on the Provisional Government any talk of support for it. But the resolution still included a call for the “revolutionary democracy” to “exercise vigilant control” over the Provisional Government, “urging it on toward a most energetic struggle for the complete liquidation of the old regime”—just the kind of illusion-breeding demands Lenin would attack when he appeared on the last day of the conference to deliver the contents of his April Theses (April 4). One of the conference sessions entertained a proposal by the Menshevik leader Nikolai Tseretelli, and supported by Stalin, Kamenev, and others, for unity talks between the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties. 43

The first reason for the party’s confusion was simply that events had evolved in an unexpected way. The autocracy was not overthrown in 1905, only threatened. The Bolsheviks viewed participation, indeed leadership, in such a government imperative and the sequence of events in which the tsarist government would fall and be replaced by such a government. In 1917, by contrast, the tsar was overthrown in a matter of days, and revolutionaries were immediately presented with an unforeseen situation: a dual power consisting of soviets and a bourgeois provisional government. 44

But the confusion was also political , in the sense that the Bolsheviks were not, as we have shown, programmatically equipped to see the soviets as a more permanent form of workers’ power.

Now that the tsar was gone, what attitude should Bolsheviks take to the Provisional Government? It clearly was not the “dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” On the contrary, it was a bourgeois government committed to maintaining the landlords’ estates, curtailing the class struggle in the factories, and continuing Russia’s involvement in the war. No Bolshevik could argue to “join” or participate in it (the policy in 1905). Clearly it was necessary to support and build up the soviets. But to what end? Should they “pressure” the Provisional Government, or overthrow it? And if overthrown and replaced by soviet power—do the soviets, as per the 1905 scenario, give way to a constituent assembly, or the hitherto unacceptable , and take steps toward socialism—essentially adopting Trotsky’s position?

The Mensheviks, in keeping with their view that the revolution was bourgeois (and that the working class should not “frighten” the liberals), did an about-face and moved from critical support to actual participation in the Provisional Government.

After Lenin’s arrival the party shifted left in only a matter of weeks and took a more decisive and unified stand. This was due to several factors: one, sections of the party in Vyborg and on the Russian Bureau, as we have seen, were already inclined— based on the old formula—to reject the Provisional Government and support the soviets.

But a second, equally important reason is that events themselves—that is, the increasingly obvious counterrevolutionary intent of the Provisional Government—pushed the party in a more decisive direction.

Lenin argued in his “April Theses” and related articles and speeches that the slogan “All power to the soviets” was not a call for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government; to attempt that it was necessary to engage in “patient, systematic, and persistent explanation” in order to win over the masses, “so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.” 45 And indeed in April it was not just Lenin’s persuasive analysis of the situation, but also the confirmation of it in experience, that contributed to the speed with which he was able to win the debate in the party.

Trotsky describes the sense of disappointment in the government already developing among the masses, exhibited in the massive May Day demonstration held on April 18, where an “attentive ear might have caught already among the ranks of the workers and soldiers impatient and even threatening notes.” In addition to anger over rising prices and bread ration cuts, workers chafed at the resistance of the bosses and the government to the eight-hour day. Soldiers expressed dismay over the question of the war’s continuation: “When will the revolution bring peace? What are Kerensky and Tseretelli waiting for? 46

On the very day this demonstration took place, the bourgeois Cadet minister of foreign affairs, Paul Miliukov, sent a message to Russia’s war allies that stated Russia’s war intentions as purely defensive, but he attached a note to it assuring the allies that in Russia “the universal desire to carry the world war through to a decisive victory had only been strengthened.” 47 The note was published a few days later and caused a firestorm among the masses that came out into the streets in protest to demand Miliukov’s resignation—which happened on May 2—causing the reshuffling of the cabinet and the inclusion in it of five moderate socialists in addition to Kerensky.

Such was the shift leftward in response to this crisis that by the end of April the Bolsheviks had already achieved a majority in the Vyborg, Vasiliev Island, and Narva district soviets. These developments in the class struggle nudged the Bolsheviks toward Lenin’s position, and explain why Lenin was able to marginalize the party’s right wing (Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, Ryazanov, and others) so quickly. The latter shifted to supporting Lenin’s slogan “All power to the soviets”; but they interpreted it not as a shift toward workers’ power but as the basis of a coalition government of all left-wing parties that would, in time, hand power over to the Constituent Assembly. 48 What Lenin had to say in April 1917—and we will elaborate further on this below—went well beyond this conception.

How Lenin rearmed

As noted earlier, there were essentially three main reasons why Lenin was more prepared than other Bolshevik leaders to grasp the new situation in Russia (though at this time he was largely reading only the bourgeois foreign press to get his information) and to quickly outline with clarity and depth a way forward. First was Lenin’s attentiveness to real changes in the world and his willingness on this basis to reassess “what is to be done,” a trait he had amply demonstrated in the past. He made this clear in his debate with Kamenev and other Bolsheviks when he returned in April:

“Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action,” Marx and Engels always said, rightly ridiculing the mere memorizing and repetition of “formulas,” that at best are capable only of marking out general tasks, which are necessarily modifiable by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process. 49

As historian E. H. Carr explains, the key issue between Lenin and Kamenev was

narrowed down to the question whether, as Lenin proposed, the party should work for the transfer of power to the Soviets, or whether, as Kamenev desired, it should be content with “the most watchful control” over the Provisional Government by the Soviets, Kamenev being particularly severe on anything that could be construed as incitement to overthrow the government. 50

Kamenev argued that the “bourgeois-democratic revolution” was not yet completed—because there had yet been no agrarian reform under workers’ and peasants’ power—and therefore the “old Bolshevik” program still applied. To this Lenin replied that power had already passed into the hands of the bourgeoisie and in that sense the “bourgeois-democratic revolution” had already been completed. By this Lenin did not mean that the demands of the revolution, in particular for peace and land, had been achieved, but in the strict sense that power had passed from one class to another, while another potential power, the soviets, had acquiesced to it. The only way now to complete these tasks was to break from the moderate defensist parties that were propping up the counterrevolutionary Provisional Government and transfer power to a new class. As Trotsky summarizes in History of the Russian Revolution:

Lenin saw, of course, as clearly as his opponents that the democratic revolution was not finished, that on the contrary without really beginning it had already begun to drop into the past. But from this very fact it resulted that only the rulers of a new class could carry it through to the end, and that this could be achieved no otherwise but by drawing the masses out from under the influence of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries—that is to say, from the indirect influence of the liberal bourgeoisie. 51

It was no use, Lenin insisted in the debate,

reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality. . . . The person who now speaks only of a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of “Bolshevik” pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of “old Bolsheviks”). 52

The question now was not to differentiate the working-class policy of soviet power as a means to bringing an end to war from the “democracy” that was using the mantle of revolution to bring the revolution to a stage “acceptable” to the liberal bourgeoisie. “Old Bolshevism should be discarded,” he said on April 14. “To be revolutionaries, even democrats, with Nicholas removed, is not great merit. Revolutionary Democracy is not good at all; it is a mere phrase” that “covers up rather than lays bare the antagonism of class interests.” 53

It wasn’t simply, though, that Lenin grasped that the old Bolshevik program was outdated—it was also that he had made a theoretical shift based on a reassessment of the Marxist understanding of the role of the state. But before we deal with this question, we must first look at the impact of the imperialist war on Lenin’s thinking.

The prospects for world revolution

For our purposes, we will focus in on a few key points that were made clear to Lenin by the war, and which he hammered on in many articles. Imperialism represented capitalism’s “highest” or “latest” stage, which Lenin defined as the emergence, through the concentration and centralization of capital, of giant, state-backed monopolies; the export of capitalism overseas; and the carving up of the globe into “spheres of interest” between the world’s biggest capitalist powers.

The world war, Lenin argued, was not based on mistaken policy but resulted from the unavoidable clash between the world’s leading capitalist powers vying for world domination, a “struggle for markets and for freedom to loot foreign countries.” 54 Monopoly capitalism had reached a stage in which the struggle for political and military dominance was an inbuilt and inevitable feature of the world system.

Capitalism had reached a stage where decay and stagnation had begun to set in—a process that would persist so long as capitalism continued. Capitalism developed extremely unevenly, producing both dominant imperialist powers and subordinating, weaker nations; nevertheless, material conditions on a world scale were now fully ripe for the creation of socialism:

Imperialismis the highest stage of development of capitalism. Capital in the advanced countries has outgrown the boundaries of national states. It has established monopoly in place of competition, thus creating all the objective prerequisites for the achievement of socialism. Hence, in Western Europe and in the United States of America, the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for the overthrow of the capitalist governments, for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, is on the order of the day. 55

The support of German social democrats and other socialist leaders for their “own” government’s war effort was a grave “betrayal” of working-class internationalism, their prewar pledge to oppose the outbreak of war and to use the war, when it came, to hasten capitalism’s downfall. The socialist leaders’ shift to support for their own respective countries signaled the bankruptcy of the Second International. This betrayal was not accidental. It had its roots in the creation of a layer of officialdom (in the trade unions, the party press, and parliamentary wings) within the socialist movement, fattened from the crumbs of imperialism and seeing organizational preservation taking precedence over challenging the system, who used socialist rhetoric to cover up their accommodation to the status quo. This state of affairs required that genuine internationalists prepare to create the left-wing organizational nuclei that could begin the process of forming revolutionary parties untainted by opportunism.

This was an urgent question because the war revealed that capitalism had reached a stage of insuperable contradictions that could only be solved by its overthrow. Lenin was fully aware that the organized forces supporting such a prognosis were at that stage quite small. But the horrors and privations of the war were driving the working class into open resistance and raising the question of socialism to the level of a practical, immediate question, that is, ending the war was inseparably linked to worldwide socialist revolution—hence Lenin’s slogan, “turn the imperialist war into a civil war,” turn the weapons of war against your oppressors.

Lenin was clear that the opportunist trend brought into clear light by the outbreak of war existed from the beginning of the formation of the Second International. “Thestruggle between the two main trends in the labor movement—revolutionary socialism and opportunist socialism—fills the entire period from 1889 to 1914.” 56 Only now did Lenin argue, however, that these two trends must organizationally separate.His ability to quickly draw this conclusion was based on the Russian experience, in which the Bolsheviks had by 1912 decisively broken from the “liquidators”—that is, from the moderate socialists in Russia who wanted a legal labor party and who renounced the underground and, by extension, all talk of overthrowing the tsar. This separation Lenin now saw as an urgent international necessity.

This sense of the immanence of revolution not just in Russia, but internationally, was unique to Lenin and perhaps a handful of other revolutionaries at the time, such as Trotsky and Karl Radek. But none were as clear as Lenin in drawing immediate organizational conclusions from this fact, that revolutionaries in every country must reconstitute the nucleus of new, revolutionary organizations, free from the taint of reformism and opportunism (the common term used by the Left to describe the acceptance of short-term gain at the expense of long-term goals), in preparation for the rapid development of potential revolutionary situations as a result of the war crisis. 57

Lenin put forward a program of international revolution as the only means to put an end the imperialist slaughter:

In every country the Socialists must above all explain to the masses the indisputable truth that a genuinely enduring and genuinely democratic peace (without annexations, etc.) can now be achieved only if it is concluded not  by the present bourgeois governments, or by bourgeois governments in general, but by proletarian governments that have overthrown the rule of the bourgeoisie and are proceeding to expropriate it. . . . Allpropaganda for socialism must be refashioned from abstract and general to concrete and directly practical. 58

This prognosis was predicated not only on the material ripeness of the world for the establishment of socialism, but also in terms of the subjective factor of class power and maturing consciousness. If the Paris Commune showed that workers could make a heroic attempt “to overthrow bourgeois rule and capture power for the introduction of socialism,” Lenin argued, “Then a similar attempt is a thousand times more achievable, possible and likely to succeed now, when a much larger number of better organized and more class-conscious workers of several countries are in possession of much better weapons, and when with every passing day the course of the war is enlightening and revolutionizing the masses.” 59

There can be no doubt that Lenin’s heightened internationalist perspective and orientation after the outbreak of war, his understanding of imperialism as the expression of capitalism’s ripeness for socialism, and the crisis of the war producing class and national struggles worldwide had a direct impact on his ability to shift from emphasizing working-class leadership in a bourgeois revolution to proletarian leadership in a socialist revolution . From this it was but a short step to arguing in April that, “if the state power in the two countries, Germany and Russia, were to pass wholly and exclusively into the hands of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the whole of humanity would heave a sigh of relief, for then we would really be assured of a speedy termination of the war, of a really lasting, truly democratic peace among all the nations, and, at the same time, the transition of all countries to socialism.” 60

Lenin’s reassessment of the state

The third letter of Lenin’s “Letters from Afar,” written in early March—just weeks after the fall of the tsar—outlined his new position on soviet power. It is worth quoting at length:

We need revolutionary  government , we need (for a certain transitional period) a state . This is what distinguishes us from the anarchists. The difference between the revolutionary Marxists and the anarchists . . . on the question of government, of the state, is that we are for , and the anarchists against , utilizing revolutionary forms of the state in a revolutionary way for the struggle for socialism. We need a state. But  not the kind of state the bourgeoisie has created everywhere, from constitutional monarchies to the most democratic republics. And in this we differ from the opportunists and Kautskyites of the old, and decaying, socialist parties, who have distorted, or have forgotten, the lessons of the Paris Commune and the analysis of these lessons made by Marx and Engels. We need a state, but  not  the kind the bourgeoisie needs, with organs of government in the shape of a police force, an army and a bureaucracy (officialdom) separate from and opposed to the people. All bourgeois revolutions merely perfected this state machine, merely transferred it from the hands of one party to those of another. The proletariat, on the other hand, if it wants to uphold the gains of the present revolution and proceed further, to win peace, bread and freedom, must “ smash, ” to use Marx’s expression, this “ready-made” state machine and substitute a new one for it by merging the police force, the army and the bureaucracy with the entire armed people . Followingthe path indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the proletariat must organize and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands, in order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power. 61

Neither Lenin, nor any leading Marxist of the Second International held this view, which had first been expressed by Marx and Engels in their writings on the Paris Commune, that the state must be “smashed” and replaced by organs of direct working-class democracy. Soon after this, in April, Lenin linked the question of workers’ power in Russia to “introducing” measures as “a step toward socialism,” 62 based on the expectation that Russia’s revolution would be but a prelude to revolution in Europe. In Lenin’s first speech at the Petrograd City Conference on April 13, he elaborated on what he meant by the transfer of all power to the soviets. “Events have led to the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry being interlocked with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” he said. “The next stage is the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . Soviets of Workers’ and other Deputies should be organized all over the country life itself demands it. There is no other way. This is the Paris Commune! . . . This is the type of state under which it is possible to advance towards socialism.” 63

This concept of soviet power as a step toward socialism represented, as we have already pointed out, a departure from the Bolshevik program prior to 1917; but it was also a departure from Lenin’s pre-1917 discussion of the lessons of the Commune, which, according to Lenin in 1905, “confused the tasks of fighting for a republic with the tasks of fighting for Socialism.” 64

But this was also a departure from what had to that point been Marxist orthodoxy on the question of the state, which (from both its reformist and revolutionary wings) had posited the task of socialism to be the “seizure” of state power, not its destruction and replacement by a “Commune state.” Even Trotsky, in his 1906 exposition of his theory of permanent revolution—that in Russia the belated nature of capitalist development could lead to the working class coming to power sooner there than in the more “advanced” West—could write: “Every political party worthy of its name strives to capture political power and thus place the State at the service of the class whose interests it expresses.” 65

Lenin’s reorientation on this question is often presented as if Lenin changed his views on the state after the February Revolution. It is true that Lenin wrote State and Revolution , in which he reexamines Marx and Engels’s views on the state, while he was in hiding after the abortive July demonstrations, and it was not published until 1918. As a result, his book is often presented as Lenin’s conclusions from his observations from afar February 1917. But the truth—and really, the only thing that can explain the speed with which Lenin made such a decisive shift—is that he had already changed his position prior to the outbreak of the February Revolution.

An interesting but rarely cited essay by Marian Sawer in the 1977 Socialist Register , “The Genesis of State and Revolution, ” explains the process of Lenin’s conversion, which happened through the course of 1916. As Sawyer explains:

This theoretical leap by Lenin in January–February 1917 was in no way connected with the reemergence of a soviet movement in Russia. The latter only occurred (and only at first in Petrograd) concurrently with the Revolution of 27 February, rumors of which did not reach Lenin in Zurich until 2 March (both dates given according to the Julian Calendar). Lenin had written to Kollontai on 17 February saying that he had already almost finished preparing the material for the article on the state. 66

Lenin showed no awareness in any of his writings or notes before 1917 of Marx’s argument (repeated by Engels in an 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto) in which “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” 67 Nor did he seem to have read Engels’s 1891 introduction to Marx’s Civil War in France :

From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. 68

Lenin’s shift came about as a result of a disagreement over the question of the state with Nikolai Bukharin, with whom Lenin was already having a sharp disagreement over the national question. 69 In 1916, Bukharin wrote an article titled, “Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State,” in which he argued that the development of the capitalist state in the era of imperialism had transformed it from a guardian of capitalist interests into a monstrous bureaucratic behemoth, rendering the relationship of social democracy to the state an acute question of the day. 70 Bukharin quoted Marx and Engels to the effect that the state, a product of class society, was not needed at every stage of human development, and that in a society without classes, the state would disappear. But the real “bombshell” in his essay was the argument that it was wrong to see statism vs. antistatism as the dividing line between Marxists and anarchists:

Despite what many people say, the difference between Marxists and anarchists is not that the Marxists are statists whereas the anarchists are anti-statists. . . . The form of state power is retained only in the transitional moment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a form of class domination in which the ruling class is the proletariat. With the disappearance of the proletarian dictatorship, the final form of the state’s existence disappears as well.

The working class, argued Bukharin, must replace the capitalist state machine and create its own temporary organs of state power. “Either the workers’ organizations, like all the organizations of the bourgeoisie, grow into the general state organization and become a simple appendage of the state apparatus, or, alternatively, they outgrow the confines of the state and explode it from within, organizing their own state power (or dictatorship).” He concluded:

In the growing revolutionary struggle, the proletariat destroys the state organization of the bourgeoisie, takes over its material framework, and creates its own temporary organization of state power. Having beaten back every counterattack of the reaction and cleared the way for the free development of socialist humanity, the proletariat, in the final analysis, abolishes its own dictatorship as well, once and for all driving an aspen stake. 71

Against this, Lenin wrote an article (where Bukharin is referred to as “Nota-Bene”) in which he reaffirmed what he considered to be the correct position:

Onthe question of the differences between socialists and anarchists in their attitude towards the state, Comrade Nota-Bene in his article…falls into a very serious error. . . . Socialists are in favor of utilizing the present state and its institutions in the struggle for the emancipation of the working class, maintaining also that the state should be used for a specific form of transition from capitalism to socialism. This transitional form is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is also a state. Theanarchists want to “abolish” the state, “blow it up” ( sprengen ) as Comrade Nota-Bene expresses it in one place, erroneously ascribing this view to the socialists. The socialists—unfortunately the author quotes Engels’s relevantwords rather incompletely—hold that the state will “wither away,” will gradually “fall asleep” after the bourgeoisie has been expropriated. 72

Lenin added parenthetically that he hoped “to return to this very important subject in a separate article.” As Sawer explains, Lenin did return to this subject. He went back and reread everything Marx and Engels wrote on the question of the state, and compiled a series of notes on them in what is now called the “Blue Notebook.” The notebook reveals not only Lenin’s conversion to Marx and Engels’s (and Bukharin’s) arguments about the state, but also his recognition that the soviets of 1905 were akin to the Commune of 1871, and that the former represented a new form of working-class state power similar to the latter. “One could perhaps express the whole thing in a drastically abbreviated fashion as follows,” he writes in his notes: “The replacement of the old (‘ready made’) state machine and of parliaments by soviets of workers’ deputies and their mandated delegates. This is the essence of it!!” 73

Thus it is easy to see why Lenin’s “April Theses” caused such an uproar in the party: it was utilizing a new framework that Lenin had only just developed in the weeks leading up to the overthrow of the tsar in late February. And it also renders untenable the current fashionable argument that Lenin did not “rearm” the party. 74 In reality, Lenin had to theoretically rearm himself before he rearmed the party. It is this that explains why even those who were closest to Lenin’s views in Russia, for example, the workers of the Vyborg Committee, failed to expand their position against the Provisional Government and for soviet power beyond the confines of the 1905 position.

It was precisely the contradictions of the Bolshevik’s “democratic dictatorship” position, and its acceptance of the bourgeois limits of the revolution, combined with its rejection of bourgeois leadership and the necessity of proletarian hegemony to carry it out, that contributed to the confusion in the Bolshevik ranks in the early days of the revolution. That is, Lenin’s own theoretical formulations are a big factor in explaining the confusion. The right wing of the party emphasized the “bourgeois limitations,” leading to equivocation on the Provisional Government, whereas the left wing and the proletarian ranks in Vyborg emphasized the “inner dynamic of independent working-class action,” and the hegemonic role of the working class, and saw immediately the treacherous nature of the Provisional Government and the need to go beyond it.

It is this latter fact that explains why Lenin was able so quickly to win the argument in April—the party was partially prepared by its own previous perspectives, and partially unprepared by it. But those elements closest to the fighting were most inclined toward the Bolshevik’s historic emphasis on working-class leadership in the revolution and an understanding of the bourgeois liberal’s counterrevolutionary role. The Bolsheviks were the most politically prepared party in 1917, to be sure. But its politics were initially not wholly up to the task. Nevertheless, as Tony Cliff points out, “when it came to the test in 1917, Bolshevism, after an internal struggle, overcame its bourgeois democratic crust.” 75

Lenin’s role in the Russian Revolution was crucial. But he could not have played this role had a party not been built prior to 1917 that had sunk deep roots in Russia’s working class and had fought for and bled with that class. For Lenin, the course of the revolution would be determined not by preconceived formulas, but by the state of the organization and consciousness of the working class, and the way in which Russian workers could begin a process of world revolution. How far the struggle could go for him was always determined by “the dynamic of the struggle itself.” 76 At the same time, Lenin’s famed willingness to look at things afresh and in their development was grounded in a strong grasp of Marxism reinforced by bouts of serious study. But even here, he knew how to let practice reshape theory, as he did when he revisited Marx and tossed out everything he had accepted on the theory of the state prior to 1917; and it was this theoretical rearmament, as much as the other factors, that allowed him to rearm the Bolshevik Party.

Here, we must give Trotsky the final word:

The “sudden” arrival of Lenin from abroad after a long absence, the furious cry raised by the press around his name, his clash with all the leaders of his own party and his quick victory over them—in a word, the external envelope of circumstance—make easy in this case a mechanical contrasting of the person, the hero, the genius, against the objective conditions, the mass, the party. In reality, such a contrast is completely one-sided. Lenin was not an accidental element in the historic development, but a product of the whole past of Russian history. He was embedded in it with deepest roots. Along with the vanguard of the workers, he had lived through their struggle in the course of the preceding quarter century. . . . Lenin did not oppose the party from outside, but was himself its most complete expression. In educating it he had educated himself in it. His divergence from the ruling circles of the Bolsheviks meant the struggle of the future of the party against its past. If Lenin had not been artificially separated from the party by the conditions of emigration and war, the external mechanics of the crisis would not have been so dramatic, and would not have overshadowed to such a degree the inner continuity of the party’s development. From the extraordinary significance which Lenin’s arrival received, it should only be, inferred that leaders are not accidentally created, that they are gradually chosen out and trained up in the course of decades, that they cannot be capriciously replaced, that their mechanical exclusion from the struggle gives the party a living wound, and in many cases may paralyze it for a long period. 77

• N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: A Personal Record, ed., trans., abr., Joel Carmichael, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 282.
• Ibid., 283. Sukhanov had previously held an antiwar position (he opposed the idea that a Russia should stay in the war to “defend itself,” even in the event of a “democratic” revolution.) But as he describes in his 1922 memoirs, when the revolution broke out he was convinced that the slogan “down with the war” would alienate the bourgeoisie, whom he believed should be convinced to take power. In his estimation, the working class could create “fighting organizations,” but was not prepared, politically or organizationally, for state power. “It was clear then apriori,” he writes, “that if a bourgeois government and the adherence of the bourgeoisie to the revolution were to be counted on, it was temporarily necessary to shelve the slogans against the war ,” 12.
• F. F. Raskolnikov, Kronstadt and Petrograd (London: New Park, 1982), 76–77.
• They became known famously as the “April Theses.”
• We write “almost” because the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin was an exception.
• Tony Cliff, All Power to the Soviets: Lenin, 1914–1917 (1976; repr., Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004), 43–44.
• A detailed enumeration of many of the eyewitness accounts confirming the confusion and disagreements among Bolsheviks in the first two months of the revolution, and what I consider still to be the best political assessment of the reason for it, can be found in Leon Trotsky, “The Year 1917,” chapt. 7 in Stalin: An Appraisal (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941). http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/stalin/ch07.htm , and in Trotsky, chap. 15 “The Bolsheviks and Lenin,” and chap. 16 “Rearming the Party” in History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ . The other document that incontrovertibly demonstrates the state of the party is the minutes of the March 1917 Bolshevik Party Conference, where Lenin delivered a defense of his April Theses. These minutes were never published in Stalinist Russia, for obvious reasons, but by Trotsky (who had a copy) in his book Stalin School of Falsification (New York: Pioneer Press, 1962), 231–301, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/ssf/ .
• Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership” (1940), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky... .
• Neil Harding, in his introduction to Lenin’s Political Thought (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), quotes author Edmund Wilson to the effect that Lenin made tactical adjustments without any regard for theory and then “supports it with Marxist texts.”
• Karl Radek, “Lenin,” The Communist Review , May 1923, Vol. 4, No. 1, https://www.marxists.org/history/interna... .
• Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions, in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg , ed. Helen Scott, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 162.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 39.
• At this stage the Bolsheviks were a small minority in the soviet, which was overwhelmingly dominated by the more moderate Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties.
• Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution” [hereafter April Theses], in Collected Works , Vol. 24 [hereafter CW ] (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 22, 23.
• Lenin, April Theses, 67.
• April Theses, 22.
• Quoted in Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 423.
• Quoted in G. Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party from the Beginnings to February 1917 , (London: New Park, 1973), 108.
• Lenin, “A Tactical Platform for the Unity Congress of the R. S. D. L. P.; Draft Resolutions for the Unity Congress of the R. S. D. L. P.,” in the section titled, “The Provisional Revolutionary Government and Local Organs of Revolutionary Authority,” Lenin, CW Vol. 10 (1978), 147–164.
• Lenin, “The Socialist Party and Non-Party Revolutionism, CW Vol. 10 (1965), 77.
• A statement of Mensheviks in the Caucuses, quoted in Tony Cliff, Building the Party: Lenin 1893–1914 (1975; repr., Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2002), 171.
• Lenin, “Preface to the Collection Twelve Years, ” CW Vol. 13 (1972), 113.
• Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects, in The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), 115. Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, in their book Witnesses to Permanent Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2009), have published a series of articles that show that Trotsky developed his ideas of permanent revolution in a context in which other Marxists (and not just Parvus, whom Trotsky acknowledges as having a strong impact on his views) were thinking along similar lines. These include Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and N. Riazanov. Luxemburg, for example, wrote that the Russian Revolution “seemed less a final descendant of the old bourgeois revolutions than a forerunner of a new series of proletarian revolutions in the west.”
• Lenin, “Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,” CW, Vol. 10, 21. The party initially took a quite sectarian attitude to the soviet, demanding that it adopt the party’s program or dissolve.
• See, for example, Lenin’s 1909 article, “The Aim of the Proletariat in our Revolution,” CW Vol. 15 (1977), 360–379.
• Lenin, “The Socialist Party and Non-Party Revolutionism,” 81.
• Lenin, “Several Theses,” CW Vol. 21 (1980), 401.
• Ibid., 402.
• Ibid., 403.
• In at least one instance, Lenin presented the interval to be so short as to bring him quite close to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution: “From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organized proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way.” Lenin, “Social-Democracy’s Attitude Toward the Peasant Movement,” CW Vol. 9 (1972), 236–37.
• D. A Longley, “The Divisions in the Bolshevik Party in March 1917,” Soviet Studies , Vol. 24, No. 1 (July, 1972), 61–76. The different positions are also well outlined, with additional information, in Tony Cliff, All Power to the Soviets , chap. 7.
• Ibid, 62–64. The Vyborg Bolsheviks’ call for workers to gather for the creation of soviets at the Finland Station failed. While Bolshevik activists were in the streets fighting, the Mensheviks took the initiative to form a Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and issued an appeal for the election of delegates to convene at the Tauride Palace—the same location as the bourgeois Provisional Government. That appeal succeeded. See Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 330–34.
• Avilov quoted in Tony Cliff, All Power to the Soviets , 109.
• Ibid. , 107.
• Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 227.
• Full text of Kamenev’s article in Lars Lih, “Fully Armed: Kamenev and Pravda in March 1917,” in The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921–1928 , 8 (2014): 65. Strangely, this article is included by way of “proof” that Kamenev entered the revolution “fully armed,” because he believed in the “inevitability” at some future date, of a clash between the soviets and the provisional government. But for the right wing of the Bolsheviks, represented by figures like Kamenev, Zinoviev, Nogin, and Rykov, that “inevitable” future was, right up to the October insurrection—and even after—always being put off to a future date.
• Quoted in Cliff, All Power to the Soviets , 110.
• The declaration is in the appendix of William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution: 1917–1918: From the Overthrow of the Tsar to the Assumption of Power by the Bolsheviks, Vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 434.
• Quoted in Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal, 187–88.
• Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 231–32.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution , 238.
• The minutes of the proceedings are included in Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (New York: Pioneer Press, 1962), 231–301.
• Some of the case I make in this section borrows from John Marot’s essay, “Lenin, Bolshevism, and Social-Democratic Political Theory: The 1905 and 1917 Soviets,” Historical Materialism 22.3–4 (2014): 129–171. The essay was written in response to the case made by Lars T. Lih in “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context,” Russian History 38 (2011): 199–242, whose thesis is that Lenin’s “April Theses” did not constitute a radical break with “old Bolshevism,” and that “The actual Bolshevik message of 1917 . . . was closer in most respects to the outlook of Lenin’s opponents.” (199). A future ISR article will deal directly with this debate.
• Lenin, “April Theses,” 23.
• Trotsky, History , 334.
• Ibid., 337.
• It is no accident that the section of the party most resistant to Lenin’s April Theses continued, throughout the period leading up to the October insurrection and after, to support the idea of a government based on a coalition of all the left parties in the soviet (i.e., the parties that had strenuously opposed soviet power!), even going so far as Kamenev and Zinoviev in publicly opposing the October insurrection, and then, after its success, supporting a proposal by the Mensheviks and right SRs that a coalition soviet government be created without Lenin or Trotsky.
• Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” 43.
• E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1971), 93.
• Trotsky, History , 231.
• Ibid., 44–45. Apparently the fact that Lenin and Kamenev thought they had a serious disagreement does not seem to faze those historians who try to downplay it.
• Lenin, “Concluding Remarks in the Debate Concerning the Report on the Present Situation,” CW Vol. 22 (1977), 149.
• Lenin, “The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War,” CW Vol. 21 (1974), 15.
• Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” CW Vol. 22, 143.
• Lenin, “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International,” CW Vol. 22, 112.
• Lenin was also one of the few who understood the national question dialectically in relationship to the question of imperialism: distinguishing between the illegitimate use of “national defense” by the imperialist powers and the legitimate national demands of oppressed nations. Unlike, for example, Bukharin and Luxemburg, who considered demands for national self-determination in the era of imperialism “utopian,” Lenin saw the inevitable and growing revolts in the colonies and oppressed nations as part of the general revolutionary ferment of the period, and sought to clearly link the struggle of workers in the imperialist countries with the struggle for freedom and independence in the colonies and nations oppressed by the great powers.
• Lenin, “Theses for an Appeal to the International Socialist Committee and All Socialist Parties,” CW Vol. 23 (1981), 210.
• Lenin, “Draft Resolution on the War,” CW Vol. 24, 166.
• Lenin, “Letters from Afar,” CW Vol. 23 (1981), 325.
• Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” CW Vol. 24, 53.
• Lenin, “Report on the Present Situation and the Attitude Toward the Provisional Government, CW Vol. 24, 146.
• Lenin, “Two Tactics,” CW Vol. 9 (1962), 81.
• Trotsky, “Results and Prospects,” in Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), 62.
• Socialist Register 1977 , vol. 14, 219, http://socialistregister.com/index.php/s... .
• Engels, Preface to the Communist Manifesto, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo... .
• Engels, Postscript to Civil War in France , Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo... .
• Whereas Lenin argued for the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, and considered national and anti-colonial struggles to be an important part of the worldwide struggle against imperialism, Bukharin considered self-determination a “utopian,” “harmful” slogan. The debates are summarized effectively in chapter three of Tony Cliff, All Power to the Soviets.
• Bukharin wasn’t the only Marxist to challenge prevailing orthodoxy on the state. In State and Revolution, Lenin discusses a debate between the Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek and Karl Kautsky in 1912 over the question of mass action, in which Pannekoek put forward the view that the aim of the worker’s movement should be “the destruction and dissolution [Auflosung] of the instruments of power of the state with the aid of the instruments of power of the proletariat.” To which Kautsky replied, “The aim of our political struggle remains, as in the past, the conquest of state power by winning a majority in parliament and by raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government.” (The section in V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 154, 160. Also: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/w... ). Lenin wrote a letter to Kamenev in 1912 asking him to get copies of Die Neue Zeit where Kautsky’s articles appeared, and writes: “Kautsky replied to him [i.e., Pannekoek] on some cardinal issues in an extremely opportunist way. It is very desirable to make closer contact with the Left…and to carry on agitation among them for a principled rebuff to Kautsky. It’ll be disgraceful if they do not revolt against such opportunism!” But, as we can see from Lenin’s dispute with Bukharin in 1916 on the matter of the state, he did consider Pannekoek to be correct at that time.
• N. I. Bukharin, “Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State,” in Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism , ed. Richard B. Day (Nottingham, UK: Spokesman, 1982), 31–33.
• Lenin, “The Youth International,” CW Vol. 24, 165–66.
• Quoted in Sawer, “Genesis,” 218.
• Trotsky’s statement in History of the Russian Revolution still holds up: “There have been plenty of attempts of late years,” he wrote, “to prove that the April party crisis was a passing and almost accidental confusion. They all go to pieces at first contact with the facts.” These attempts have continued. Lars Lih and Eric Blanc (though they are not in complete agreement) have written a series of articles over the past years laying out the view that emphasizes the continuity of Bolshevik policy in 1917 and that Trotsky (and virtually everyone else) exaggerates the disagreements in the party and overestimates the degree to which Lenin’s April Thesis “rearmed” the party. Lih goes so far as to claim that the revolution’s course confirms that it was in fact Kamenev’s views in the April debates that won out in the Party, not Lenin’s. (See: Lars T. Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context,” Russian History 38 (2011) 199–242; “Fully Armed: Kamenev and Pravda in March 1917,” 55-68; “Letter from Afar, Corrections from Up Close: The Bolshevik Consensus of March 1917,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16 (Fall 2015): 799–834; Eric Blanc, “Before Lenin: Bolshevik Theory and Practice in February 1917 Revisited,” March 2, 2017, https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2017/0... “A Revolutionary Line of March: ‘Old Bolshevism’ in Early 1917 Revisited,” April 2, 2017, https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2017/0... . See also the response to Lars Lih by John Marot: “Lenin, Bolshevism, and Social-Democratic Political Theory: The 1905 and 1917 Soviets,” Historical Materialism 22.3–4 (2014) 129–171; and another by Louis Proyect, “Lars Lih and Lenin’s April Theses,” August 15, 2015, https://louisproyect.org/2015/08/15/lars... . ) As can be seen, my take hews closely to Trotsky’s. A critical response to Lih and Blanc will appear in a forthcoming issue of the ISR .
• Tony Cliff, Lenin: Building the Party , 178.
• Ibid., 179.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 239.

Search form

"A sense of hope and the possibility for solidarity"

Sapronov and the russian revolution, disability and the soviet union: advances and retreats, the critical communism of antonio labriola, austerity, neoliberalism, and the indian working class, the legacy of louis althusser, standing up to the zionist backlash against bds, legacies of colonialism in africa, austerity, neoliberalism,
and the indian working class, "a sense of hope and the possibility of solidarity", islamic fundamentalism, the arab spring, and the left, knocking down straw figures, have the democrats evolved, giving voice to the syrian revolution, from “waste people”
to “white trash”, defending our right to criticize israel.

International Communist Current

Workers of the world, unite, search form, april theses: lenin’s fundamental role in the russian revolution.

Submitted by World Revolution on 2 April, 2007 - 17:08

It is 90 years since the start of the Russian revolution. More particularly, this month sees the 90th anniversary of the ‘April Theses’, announced by Lenin on his return from exile, and calling for the overthrow of Kerensky’s ‘Provisional Government’ as a first step towards the international proletarian revolution. In highlighting Lenin’s crucial role in the revolution, we are not subscribing to the ‘great man’ theory of history, but showing that the revolutionary positions he was able to defend with such clarity at that moment were an expression of something much deeper – the awakening of an entire social class to the concrete possibility of emancipating itself from capitalism and imperialist war. The following article was originally published in World Revolution 203, April 1997. It can be read in conjunction with a more developed study of the April Theses now republished on our website, ‘ The April Theses: signpost to the proletarian revolution ’.

On 4 April 1917 Lenin returned from his exile in Switzerland, arrived in Petrograd and addressed himself directly to the workers and soldiers who crowded the station in these terms: “Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and work­ers. I am happy to greet in you the victorious Russian revolution, to greet you as the ad­vance guard of the International proletarian army... The Russian revolution achieved by you has opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!...” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution ). 80 years later the bourgeoisie, its historians and media lackeys, are constantly busy main­taining the worst lies and historic distor­tions on the world proletarian revolution begun in Russia.

The ruling class’ hatred and contempt for the titanic movement of the exploited masses aims to ridicule it and to ‘show’ the futility of the communist project of the working class, its fundamental inability to bring about a new social order for the planet. The collapse of the eastern bloc has revived its class hatred. It has unleashed a gigantic campaign since then to hammer home the obvious defeat of commu­nism, identified with Stalinism, and with that the defeat of marxism, the obsolescence of the class struggle and even the idea of revolution which can only lead to terror and the Gulag. The target of this foul propaganda is the political organisation, the incarnation of the vast insurrectionary movement of 1917, the Bolshevik Party, which constantly draws all the vindictiveness of the defenders of the bourgeoisie. For all these apologists for the capitalist order, including the anarchists, whatever their apparent disagreements, it is a question of showing that Lenin and the Bol­sheviks were a band of power-hungry fanatics who did everything they could to usurp the democratic acquisitions of the February 1917 revolution (see ‘February 1917’ WR 202) and plunge Russia and the world into one of the most disastrous experiences in history.

Faced with all these unbelievable calumnies against Bolshevism, it falls to revolutionaries to re-establish the truth and reaffirm the essential point concerning the Bolshevik Party: it was not a product of Russian barbarism or backwardness, nor of deformed anarcho-ter­rorism, nor of the absolute concern for power by its leaders. Bolshevism was, in the first place, a product of the world proletariat, linked to a marxist tradition, the vanguard of the international movement to end all exploi­tation and oppression. To this end the state­ment of positions Lenin brought out on his return to Russia, known as the April Theses, gives us an excellent point of departure to refute all the various untruths on the Bolshe­vik Party, its nature, its role and its links with the proletarian masses.

The conditions of struggle on Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917

In the previous article ( WR 202) we recalled that the working class in Russia had well and truly opened the way to the world communist revolution with the events of February 1917, overturning Tsarism, organising in soviets and showing a growing radicalisation. The insurrection resulted in a situation of dual power. The official power was the bourgeois ‘Provisional Government’, initially lead by the liberals but which later gained a more ‘socialist’ hue under the direction of Kerensky. On the other hand effective power already lay, as was well understood, in the hands of the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Without soviet authorisation the government had little hope of imposing its directives on the workers and soldiers. But the working class had not yet acquired the necessary political maturity to take all the power. In spite of their more and more radical actions and attitudes, the majority of the working class and behind them the peasant masses, were held back by illusions in the nature of the bourgeoisie, and by the idea that only a bourgeois democratic revolution was on the agenda in Russia. The predominance of these ideas among the masses was reflected in the domination of the soviets by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who did everything they could to make the soviets impotent in the face of the newly installed bourgeois regime. These parties, which had gone over, or were in the process of going over, to the bourgeoisie, tried by all means to subordinate the growing revolution­ary movement to the aims of the Provisional Government, especially in relation to the im­perialist war. In this situation, so full of dangers and promises, the Bolsheviks, who had directed the internationalist opposition to the war, were themselves in almost complete confusion at that moment, politically disorien­tated. So, “ In the ‘manifesto’ of the Bolshevik Central Committee, drawn up just after the victory of the insurrection, we read that ‘the workers of the shops and factories, and likewise the mutinied troops, must immediately elect their representatives to the Provisional Revolutionary Government’... They behaved not like the representatives of a proletarian party preparing an independent struggle for power, but like the left wing of a democracy ” ( Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution , vol. 1, chapter XV , p.271, 1967 Sphere edi­tion). Worse still, when Stalin and Kamenev took the direction of the party in March, they moved it even further to the right. Pravda, the official organ of the party, openly adopted a defencist position on the war: “Our slogan is not the meaningless ‘down with war’... every man remains at his fighting post.” (Trotsky, p.275). The flagrant abandonment of Lenin’s position on the transformation of the imperi­alist war into a civil war caused resistance and even anger in the party and among the work­ers of Petrograd, the heart of the proletariat. But these most radical elements were not capable of offering a clear programmatic alternative to this turn to the right. The party was then drawn towards compromise and treason, under the influence of the fog of democratic euphoria which appeared after the February revolt.

The political rearmament of the Party

It fell to Lenin, then, after his return from abroad, to politically rearm the party and to put forward the decisive importance of the revolutionary direction through the April Theses: “Lenin’s theses produced the effect of an exploding bomb” (Trotsky, p. 295). The old party programme had become null and void, situated far behind the spontaneous action of the masses. The slogan to which the “Old Bolsheviks” were attached, the “demo­cratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” was henceforth an obsolete formula as Lenin put forward: “ The revolutionary democratic revolution of the proletariat and the peasants has already been achieved... ” (Lenin, Letters on tactics ). However, “ The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution - which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. ” (Point 2 of the April Theses). Lenin was one of the first to grasp the revolutionary significance of the soviet as an organ of proletarian political power. Once again Lenin gave a lesson on the marxist method, in showing that marxism was the complete opposite of a dead dogma but a living scientific theory which must be con­stantly verified in the laboratory of social movements.

Similarly, faced with the Menshevik posi­tion according to which backward Russia was not yet ripe for socialism, Lenin argued as a true internationalist that the immediate task was not to introduce socialism in Russia (Thesis 8). If Russia, in itself, was not ready for socialism, the imperialist war had demon­strated that world capitalism as a whole was truly over-ripe. For Lenin, as for all the authentic internationalists then, the interna­tional revolution was not just a pious wish but a concrete perspective developed from the international proletarian revolt against the war - the strikes in Britain and Germany, the political demonstrations, the mutinies and fraternisations in the armed forces of several countries, and certainly the growing revolu­tionary flood in Russia itself, which revealed it. This is where the appeal for the creation of a new International at the end of the Theses came from. This perspective was going to be completely confirmed after the October insur­rection by the extension of the revolutionary wave to Italy, Hungary, Austria and above all Germany.

This new definition of the proletariat’s tasks also brought another conception of the role and function of the party. There also the “Old Bolsheviks” like Kamenev were at first re­volted by Lenin’s vision, his idea of the soviets taking power on the one hand and on the other his insistence on the class autonomy of the proletariat against the bourgeois government and the imperialist war, even if that would mean remaining for awhile in the minority and not as Kamenev would like: “ remaining with the masses of the revolutionary proletariat ”. Kamenev used the conception of “ a mass party ” to oppose Lenin’s conception of a party of determined revolutionaries, with a clear programme, united, centralised, minoritarian, capable of resisting the siren calls of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie and illusions existing in the working class. This conception of the party has nothing to do with the Blanquist terrorist sect, that Lenin was accused of putting forward, nor even with the anarchist concep­tion submitting to the spontaneity of the masses. On the contrary there was the recognition that in a period of massive revolutionary turbu­lence, of the development of consciousness in the class, the party can no longer organise nor plan to mobilise the masses in the way of the conspiratorial associations of the 19th century. But that made the role of the party more essential than ever. Lenin came back to the vision that Rosa Luxemburg developed in her authoritative analysis of the mass strike in the period of decadence: “ If we now leave the pedantic scheme of demonstrative mass strikes artificially brought about by order of the par­ties and trade unions, and turn to the living picture of a peoples’ movement arising with elemental energy... it becomes obvious that the task of social democracy does not consist in the technical preparation and direction of mass strikes, but first and foremost in the political leadership of the whole movement. ” (Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Un­ions ). All Lenin’s energy was going to be orientated towards the necessity of convincing the party of the new tasks which fell to it, in relation to the working class, the central axis of which is the development of class conscious­ness. Thesis 4 posed this clearly: “ The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolu­tionary government and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation espe­cially adapted to the practical needs of the masses… we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. ” So this approach, this will to defend clear and precise class principles, going against the current and being in a minority, has nothing to do with purism or sectarianism. On the contrary they were based on a comprehension of the real movement which was unfolding in the class at each moment, on the capacity to give a voice and direction to the most radical elements within the proletariat. The insurrection was impossible as long as the Bolshevik’s revolutionary positions, positions maturing through­out the revolutionary process in Russia, had not consciously won over the soviets. We are a very long way from the bourgeois obscenities on the supposed putschist attitude of the Bolsheviks! As Lenin still affirmed: “ We are not charlatans. We must base ourselves only on the consciousness of the masses ” (Lenin’s second speech on his arrival in Petrograd, cited in Trotsky, p. 293).

Lenin’s mastery of the marxist method, seeing beyond the surface and appearances of events, allowed him in company with the best elements of the party, to discern the real dynamic of the movement which was un­folding before their eyes and to meet the profound desires of the masses and give them the theoretical resources to defend their positions and clarify their actions. They were also enabled to orientate them­selves against the bourgeoisie by seeing and frustrating the traps which the latter tried to set for the proletariat, as during the July days in 1917. That’s why, contrary to the Mensheviks of this time and their numerous anarchist, social democratic and councilist successors, who caricature to excess certain real errors by Lenin [1] in order to reject the proletarian character of the October 1917 revolution, we reaffirm the fundamental role played by Lenin in the rectification of the Bolshevik Party, without which the prole­tariat would not have been able to take power in October 1917. Lenin’s life-long struggle to build the revolutionary organisation is a his­toric acquisition of the workers’ movement. It has left revolutionaries today an indispensa­ble basis to build the class party, allowing them to understand what their role must be in the class as a whole. The victorious insurrec­tion of October 1917 validates Lenin’s view. The isolation of the revolution after the defeat of the revolutionary attempts in other coun­tries of Europe stopped the international dy­namic of the revolution which would have been the sole guarantee of a local victory in Russia. The soviet state encouraged the ad­vent of Stalinism, the veritable executioner of the revolution and of the Bolsheviks.

What remains essential is that during the rising tide of the revolution in Russia, the Lenin of the April Theses was never an isolated prophet, nor was he holding himself above the vulgar masses, but he was the clearest voice of the most revolutionary tendency within the proletariat, a voice which showed the way which lead to the victory of October 1917. “ In Russia the prob­lem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future every­where belongs to ‘Bolshevism’. ” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution ). SB, March 2007.

[1] Among these great play is made by the councilists on the theory of ‘consciousness brought from outside’ developed in ‘What is to be done?’. Well, afterwards, Lenin recognised this error and amply proved in practice that he had acquired a correct vision of the process of the development of consciousness in the work­ing class.

History of the workers' movement: 

• 1917 - Russian Revolution

Bookmark/Search this post

Spartacus Educational

April theses.

On 10th March, 1917, Tsar Nicholas II had decreed the dissolution of the Duma . The High Command of the Russian Army now feared a violent revolution and on 12th March suggested that the Tsar should abdicate in favour of a more popular member of the royal family. Attempts were now made to persuade Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich to accept the throne. He refused and the Tsar recorded in his diary that the situation in "Petrograd is such that now the Ministers of the Duma would be helpless to do anything against the struggles the Social Democratic Party and members of the Workers Committee. My abdication is necessary... The judgement is that in the name of saving Russia and supporting the Army at the front in calmness it is necessary to decide on this step. I agreed." (1)

Prince George Lvov , was appointed the new head of the Provisional Government . Members of the Cabinet included Pavel Milyukov (leader of the Cadet Party ), was Foreign Minister, Alexander Guchkov , Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky , Minister of Justice, Mikhail Tereshchenko , a beet-sugar magnate from the Ukraine , became Finance Minister, Alexander Konovalov , a munitions maker, Minister of Trade and Industry, and Peter Struve , Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ariadna Tyrkova commented: "Prince Lvov had always held aloof from a purely political life. He belonged to no party, and as head of the Government could rise above party issues. Not till later did the four months of his premiership demonstrate the consequences of such aloofness even from that very narrow sphere of political life which in Tsarist Russia was limited to work in the Duma and party activity. Neither a clear, definite, manly programme, nor the ability for firmly and persistently realising certain political problems were to be found in Prince G. Lvov. But these weak points of his character were generally unknown." (2)

Prince George Lvov allowed all political prisoners to return to their homes. Joseph Stalin arrived at Nicholas Station in St. Petersburg with Lev Kamenev and Yakov Sverdlov on 25th March, 1917. The three men had been in exile in Siberia . Stalin's biographer, Robert Service , has commented: "He was pinched-looking after the long train trip and had visibly aged over the four years in exile. Having gone away a young revolutionary, he was coming back a middle-aged political veteran." (3)

The exiles discussed what to do next. The Bolshevik organizations in Petrograd were controlled by a group of young men including Vyacheslav Molotov and Alexander Shlyapnikov who had recently made arrangements for the publication of Pravda , the official Bolshevik newspaper. The young comrades were less than delighted to see these influential new arrivals. Molotov later recalled: "In 1917 Stalin and Kamenev cleverly shoved me off the Pravda editorial team. Without unnecessary fuss, quite delicately." (4)

The Petrograd Soviet recognized the authority of the Provisional Government in return for its willingness to carry out eight measures. This included the full and immediate amnesty for all political prisoners and exiles; freedom of speech, press, assembly, and strikes; the abolition of all class, group and religious restrictions; the election of a Constituent Assembly by universal secret ballot; the substitution of the police by a national militia; democratic elections of officials for municipalities and townships and the retention of the military units that had taken place in the revolution that had overthrown Nicholas II . Soldiers dominated the Soviet. The workers had only one delegate for every thousand, whereas every company of soldiers might have one or even two delegates. Voting during this period showed that only about forty out of a total of 1,500, were Bolsheviks. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were in the majority in the Soviet.

The Provisional Government accepted most of these demands and introduced the eight-hour day, announced a political amnesty, abolished capital punishment and the exile of political prisoners, instituted trial by jury for all offences, put an end to discrimination based on religious, class or national criteria, created an independent judiciary, separated church and state, and committed itself to full liberty of conscience, the press, worship and association. It also drew up plans for the election of a Constituent Assembly based on adult universal suffrage and announced this would take place in the autumn of 1917. It appeared to be the most progressive government in history. (5)

When Lenin returned to Russia on 3rd April, 1917, he announced what became known as the April Theses . As he left the railway station Lenin was lifted on to one of the armoured cars specially provided for the occasions. The atmosphere was electric and enthusiastic. Feodosiya Drabkina, who had been an active revolutionary for many years, was in the crowd and later remarked: "Just think, in the course of only a few days Russia had made the transition from the most brutal and cruel arbitrary rule to the freest country in the world." (6)

In his speech Lenin attacked Bolsheviks for supporting the Provisional Government. Instead, he argued, revolutionaries should be telling the people of Russia that they should take over the control of the country. In his speech, Lenin urged the peasants to take the land from the rich landlords and the industrial workers to seize the factories. Lenin accused those Bolsheviks who were still supporting the government of Prince Georgi Lvov of betraying socialism and suggested that they should leave the party. Lenin ended his speech by telling the assembled crowd that they must "fight for the social revolution, fight to the end, till the complete victory of the proletariat". (7)

Some of the revolutionaries in the crowd rejected Lenin's ideas. Alexander Bogdanov called out that his speech was the "delusion of a lunatic." Joseph Goldenberg, a former of the Bolshevik Central Committee, denounced the views expressed by Lenin: "Everything we have just heard is a complete repudiation of the entire Social Democratic doctrine, of the whole theory of scientific Marxism. We have just heard a clear and unequivocal declaration for anarchism. Its herald, the heir of Bakunin, is Lenin. Lenin the Marxist, Lenin the leader of our fighting Social Democratic Party, is no more. A new Lenin is born, Lenin the anarchist." (8)

Joseph Stalin was in a difficult position. As one of the editors of Pravda , he was aware that he was being held partly responsible for what Lenin had described as "betraying socialism". Stalin had two main options open to him: he could oppose Lenin and challenge him for the leadership of the party, or he could change his mind about supporting the Provisional Government and remain loyal to Lenin. After ten days of silence, Stalin made his move. In the newspaper he wrote an article dismissing the idea of working with the Provisional Government. He condemned Alexander Kerensky and Victor Chernov as counter-revolutionaries, and urged the peasants to takeover the land for themselves. (9)

Primary Sources

(1) lenin , april theses, published in leaflet form on 7th april, 1917..

(1) In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible. The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests. In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence. The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front. (2) The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution - which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism. This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life. (3) No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government. (4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat. The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses. As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience. (5) 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.

Student Activities

Russian Revolution Simmulation

Bloody Sunday ( Answer Commentary )

1905 Russian Revolution ( Answer Commentary )

Russia and the First World War ( Answer Commentary )

The Life and Death of Rasputin ( Answer Commentary )

The Coal Industry: 1600-1925 ( Answer Commentary )

Women in the Coalmines ( Answer Commentary )

Child Labour in the Collieries ( Answer Commentary )

Child Labour Simulation ( Teacher Notes )

The Chartists ( Answer Commentary )

Women and the Chartist Movement ( Answer Commentary )

Road Transport and the Industrial Revolution ( Answer Commentary )

Canal Mania ( Answer Commentary )

Early Development of the Railways ( Answer Commentary )

Health Problems in Industrial Towns ( Answer Commentary )

Public Health Reform in the 19th century ( Answer Commentary )

Richard Arkwright and the Factory System ( Answer Commentary )

Robert Owen and New Lanark ( Answer Commentary )

James Watt and Steam Power ( Answer Commentary )

The Domestic System ( Answer Commentary )

The Luddites: 1775-1825 ( Answer Commentary )

The Plight of the Handloom Weavers ( Answer Commentary )

1832 Reform Act and the House of Lords ( Answer Commentary )

Benjamin Disraeli and the 1867 Reform Act ( Answer Commentary )

William Gladstone and the 1884 Reform Act ( Answer Commentary )

(1 ) Nicholas II , diary entry (15th March, 1917)

(2) ariadna tyrkova , from liberty to brest-litovsk (1918) page 30, (3) robert service , stalin: a biography (2004) page 118, (4) edvard radzinsky , stalin (1996) page 89, (5) lionel kochan , russia in revolution (1970) pages 200-207, (6) helen rappaport , conspirator: lenin in exile (2009) page 279, (7) lenin , speech (3rd april, 1917), (8) david shub , lenin (1948) page 203, (9) edvard radzinsky , stalin (1996) page 97.

A People's Tragedy

Russian Revolution

Lenin’s April Theses and the Russian Revolution

Posted on 5th april 2017 by camilla.

I shall never forget that thunder-like speech, which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidently dropped in, but all the true believers. I am certain that no one had expected anything of the sort. It seemed as though all the elements had risen from their abodes, and the spirit of universal destruction, knowing neither barriers nor doubts, neither human difficulties nor human ­calculations, was hovering above the heads of the bewitched disciples.

Nikolai Sukhanov , 1984. 1

O n the night of 3 April 1917 Lenin arrived from exile at the Finland Station in Petrograd. 2 His arrival occurred in the wake of the February Revolution some six weeks earlier when the working class had mobilised and overthrown Tsar Nicholas but which in the meantime had seen the power vacuum being filled by the setting up of a provisional government. The government was dominated by the right wing Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) party. At the same time the soviets, last glimpsed in 1905, were also starting to reappear. 3 It was at this point that Lenin first gave an outline of what were to be called the April Theses . 4 Broadly, the theses can be summarised as follows: Only the overthrow of the provisional government and the fight for soviet power could secure a state of affairs that would bring bread to the workers, land to the peasants and peace to end the imperialist war. Once achieved, soviet power would be used to abolish the existing police, army and bureaucracy, nationalise the banks and land and cement workers’ power at the point of production.

The role of the soviets and the matter of the provisional government were to be the two key features of the April Theses . The demand for power to the soviets crystallised the issue of state power and was to be the bedrock upon which all other demands depended. Certainly until Lenin’s arrival no Bolshevik leaders called for “all power to the soviets”, and in doing so he discarded his own previously held “old Bolshevik” ideas on the state. These can be traced back to at least 12 years earlier.

During the 1905 Revolution the Bolshevik leaders in Russia, Alexander Bogdanov and Pyotr Krasikov, were somewhat sceptical about how to respond to the appearance of the St Petersburg soviet. If anything they viewed the soviet with a degree of condescension seeing its spontaneity as a sign that it was politically threadbare and ultimately doomed to come under the influence of bourgeois parties. To avoid this outcome they argued that the soviet should accept the programme and leadership of the Bolsheviks and dissolve itself into the party.

The exiled Lenin voiced criticisms of this approach. But he acknowledged that his criticisms would come as a surprise to the St Petersburg Bolsheviks; 5 he appeared to be going back on what he had himself written in his seminal 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? where he had warned against kow-towing to spontaneity. 6 With the actual living unfolding of the 1905 Revolution Lenin put much greater emphasis on the soviet as the embryo of a provisional government. It was assumed that the soviet would take political responsibility for setting up such a government. It would centralise and coordinate the workers’ movement as a whole in a revolutionary setting and act as a contributory channel towards the future insurrection that would undoubtedly be required in the struggle to overthrow Tsarism. No social democrat (as revolutionary Marxists then called themselves) at that time, Lenin included, endowed the soviet in 1905 with a separate independent historical capability. Rather they viewed it as a transient phenomenon, rising and falling as a consequence of the changing balance of forces within the course of the wider struggle against Tsarism. At one point Lenin made reference to the contrast between the events of 1905 and “the now outdated conditions in What is To Be Done? ” 7

Whatever the differences in 1905 between Lenin and the St Petersburg Bolshevik leadership over the precise nature of the soviets, all agreed that the main goal was the establishment of a revolutionary provisional government which would act as the main force to dethrone the Tsar and usher in a society more akin to those in Western Europe and North America.

The original Bolshevik stance on the issue of the provisional government had been thrashed out at their London conference in 1905. Here delegates agreed to participate in any prospective provisional government. At that time the expectation of victory over the autocracy was approaching its zenith and the Bolsheviks sought to imprint a proletarian stamp on the ongoing bourgeois democratic revolution. In leading a popular uprising from below they would receive enormous political prestige and would then be able to use the strength and influence of their social base to push the revolution to the left as far as possible within the confines of capitalist property relations. By operating within the provisional government Bolsheviks would effectively be able to play a leadership role from above in addition to that which they were playing from below. Unfortunately, as always, reality bites. This perspective was never put to the test—no provisional government ever came into being during the 1905 Revolution. The brief 50-day St Petersburg soviet was forcibly dispersed by the Tsar in November 1905 although the legacy of its achievements was not to be completely buried. In 1905 the re-emergence of soviets in the context of dual power (soviets vs provisional government) 12 years later could not have been foreseen.

Much of the impetus for Lenin’s April Theses was provided by the combination of the historical memory of the 1905 Revolution plus the new understanding that can be seen in his Blue Notebook written in January-February 1917. In these notes, sometimes referred to as Marxism on the State , Lenin shows that prior to the February Revolution he was not waiting for a second version of the soviets to arise before correctly evaluating their significance. 8 It was with these ideas already fermenting in his mind that Lenin stepped off the train at the Finland Station to deliver the April Theses .

The traditional view of the Marxist “activist” left, especially those in the Trotskyist tradition, has been that the Theses marked a sharp break with prevailing Bolshevik orthodoxy—what was to become known as “old Bolshevism”—and amounted to a political rearming of the Bolshevik Party that would make the October Revolution possible. The general historical narrative has been one where the Bolsheviks were at first somewhat shocked and taken aback by what they regarded as Lenin’s starry-eyed proposals and put it down to him being out of touch with the prevailing reality on the ground. Nevertheless, over the next two months or so, he was able to overcome their initial opposition and pull the bulk of the party membership behind his new vision. Basically, no April Theses , no October. Indeed, most mainstream historians, studying memoir literature or contemporary records, have concurred, viewing the April Theses and the April debates in Bolshevik Party circles that followed them, for good or ill, as Lenin’s triumph.

However, the renowned Canadian Marxist scholar Lars Lih has argued the opposite view. Lih insists that it was Lenin’s opponents within the Bolshevik Party—the “old Bolsheviks”—who ultimately triumphed. Lih sets out his case in his 2011 piece “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism” 9 in which he argues that the Bolsheviks eventually took power in October by ignoring, or at most paying lip-service to, the April Theses while in practice just carrying on with their traditional agitation and political activities. Moreover Lih contends that Lenin himself actually back-pedalled from his original April position. He identifies, quite rightly, that the central issue in the April debates was the political status of “old Bolshevism”; the set of ideas at the core of a political organisation that had survived years of struggle dating back to the start of the century. Lih writes: “According to Lenin, old Bolshevism was outmoded whereas other Bolsheviks such as Lev Kamenev and Mikhail Kalinin defended its relevance. The central tenet of pre-war old Bolshevism was ‘democratic revolution to the end’.” Lih’s contention is that: “Far from being rendered irrelevant by the overthrow of the Tsar; old Bolshevism mandated a political course aimed at the overthrow of the ‘bourgeois’ provisional government” with the intention of carrying out a thoroughgoing democratic revolution. 10 As will be shown, the use of the term “democratic” in this historical context camouflages more than it reveals. According to Lih, Lenin’s intervention was at best unnecessary and at worst misguided. For all practical purposes it did not have much impact on the subsequent developments that led to October. Indeed the April Theses were not, as has been generally understood, a radical departure from pre-1917 Bolshevik policy but simply a further expression of it. Lih states: “The actual Bolshevik message of 1917 (as documented by pamphlets issued by the Moscow Bolsheviks) was closer in most respects to the outlook of Lenin’s opponents”. 11

It is important to engage with Lih’s arguments, not least because he is the historian whose landmark contribution, Lenin Rediscovered: “What is To Be Done?” in Context , so comprehensively took apart the Cold War textbook interpretation of Lenin’s famous 1902 polemic. Lih confirmed what Leon Trotsky had already attested, namely that What Is To Be Done? was not, as the Stalinists and the Cold War right postulated, the founding document of a uniquely Leninist party but was instead a restatement of Russian Social Democratic orthodoxy, a position that was widely accepted as commonplace in the Second International before the First World War. 12 However, as documented elsewhere, Lih has subsequently extended his specific study of What Is To Be Done? to contend that no epistemological break ever occurred between Karl Kautsky’s Second International worldview and that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. 13 Lih paints a picture of unchanging political progression in Bolshevik history right up to and including the October Revolution. It is in this context that he dismisses the April Theses as a mere transient dispute largely based on mutual misunderstandings. His continuity narrative insists that the Bolsheviks were already amply equipped both theoretically and strategically to take full advantage of the opportunities that opened up to them after the February Revolution.

Lih sees the objective of overthrowing of the provisional government as already “the dominant mandate of old Bolshevism” 14 in 1917 and therefore not an issue that Lenin particularly needed to give such prominence to in the April Theses . However, Kamenev and Stalin, the two major Bolshevik leaders still in Russia prior to Lenin’s arrival (in point of fact Lih refers to them as “the two pillars of old Bolshevism”), had made no meaningful move whatsoever to put this supposed old Bolshevik policy into practice by the end of March 1917. The matter that took up most of their attention was how to relate to the provisional government, not how to destroy it. Lih seems simply not to acknowledge this historical fact. John Marot strongly criticises Lih here for in effect lumping together the 1905 and 1917 revolutions and suggesting that they are interchangeable. He writes: “Lih falsely projects the Bolsheviks’ 1917 question onto the 1905 Revolution and in the years running up to 1917, where it makes no sense, because no provisional government ever emerged in that period”. 15

In 1905 there was no situation of dual power between the soviets and provisional government; the only alternative form of government to the fledgling soviets was the Tsarist autocracy. As already noted, it is true that the Bolsheviks at this time came to believe that the soviet had the potential to become the provisional government but they anticipated that the circumstances in which this would occur would be by a revolutionary overthrow of Tsarism led either by the liberals (as forecast by the Mensheviks) or by workers (as projected by the Bolsheviks). In either case what old Bolshevism advocated, should any provisional government arise, was to join it and decisively use their bedrock of support among the revolutionary working class to prevent any attempt by the liberals to halt, slow down or side-track the carrying out of the bourgeois revolution “to the end”. It is precisely because old Bolshevism expected that in a revolutionary upheaval they, as a faction within the RSDLP, 16 would be participating in and even running a provisional government that Lih’s statement about old Bolshevism in 1917 having a mandate to overthrow the provisional government lacks credibility. Indeed, Barbara Allen has very recently translated several leaflets endorsed by the Bolshevik Petrograd committee in the weeks before the final collapse of Tsarism, all of which include the slogan “Long Live the Provisional Revolutionary Government!” A separate proclamation put out by the Petrograd Bolsheviks alone in February 1917 carried the headline: “For a Provisional Revolutionary Government of Workers and Poor Peasants”. 17

Ignoring the key differences between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions undermines Lih’s argument concerning the rationale of old Bolshevism as it operated in the early months of 1917. In 1905 Tsarism remained in control to the very end; in 1917 its overthrow was the opening act of the revolution. In 1905 the soviets appeared as the last act of the revolution; in 1917 they appeared as the first act and never left. In 1905 the monarchy was the only locus of power; in 1917 the monarchy had been swept out of the picture. Dual power embodied in the soviet and the provisional government arose.

Before 1917 all Russian Social Democrats including the Bolsheviks had hypothesised a provisional government born of popular struggle, but the actual government that emerged in February 1917 had emanated from a Tammany Hall-style backroom deal by a cabal of bourgeois politicians in the Duma (the Tsarist parliament). They opportunistically stepped into the power vacuum following the working class uprising and disintegration of the army in St Petersburg on 27 February, the day that saw the destruction of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. Because of the stark reality of a provisional government now led by the janus-faced imperialist-minded Kadets, it was Lenin’s and increasingly the Bolsheviks’ view that the provisional government of 1917 was ultimately going to be hostile to advancing the well-being of the Russian workers and peasants. To deal with the unalloyed facts of this situation, Lenin discarded the old Bolshevik recipe of joining the provisional government, putting the liberals in their place from the inside and then carrying out the bourgeois democratic revolution “to the end”. However, neither did he advocate simply being an opposition pressure group pushing the provisional government to the left to achieve this long-standing goal. This was the de facto position of Kamenev and Stalin.

The fight for soviet power

Lenin proposed a complete rupture with all this; the new Bolshevik aim was to be “All power to the soviets”—all future discussion was to be centred around socialist revolution as the practical living alternative to the bourgeois revolution and the provisional government. The previous, more loosely defined, “above and below” perspective of struggle no longer fitted with reality. Now only struggle from below mattered, the culmination of which would be soviet power. Without the appearance of the soviet, without the fact of dual power, there would have been no other viable option but to accept the provisional government and the self-imposed limitations of the bourgeois democratic revolution that had bought it into existence. Certainly the very idea of going beyond the bourgeois democratic revolution and destroying the provisional government would have been inconceivable.

Lih goes on to profess that in the April Theses Lenin “now argued for the soviets as a specific political form, as a higher type of government, one that was fated to replace parliamentary democracy as the only adequate form of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’”. 18 But this is not correct. Lenin did not argue that the soviet was a higher type of government merely because it was superior to parliamentary democracy. What he was arguing was something much more profound, namely that it was a completely different type of state, one fated by means of working class self-agency to replace the capitalist state in all its administrative forms, not just its parliamentary democratic form.

On 24 April 1917 at the seventh All-Russia Conference of the Bolsheviks, Lenin was to spell out this point more forcefully:

The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which cover the whole of Russia with their network, now stand at the centre of the revolution… Should they take over the power, it will no longer be a state in the ordinary sense of the word. The world has seen no state power such as this functioning for any considerable length of time, but the whole world’s organised working classes have been approaching it. This would be a state of the Paris Commune type. 19

The fact of decisive importance that Lenin is making here is that no capitalist country could tolerate the existence of such a state institution as the soviets and no socialist revolution could operate with any other state institution than this. Lenin is now clearly exhibiting a strong difference of emphasis with Lih’s assertion, noted earlier, that the central tenet of pre-war old Bolshevism was “Democratic revolution to the end”, a slogan, as he puts it, “that implied a vast social transformation of Russia under the aegis of a revolutionary government based on the narod [proletariat and peasantry]”. 20 Marot is correct to home in on this rather evasive phraseology. He writes of Lih’s “vast social transformation” that it “has a name. Social Democrats called it the ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’. The vast political transformation accompanying the social revolution also has a name: it is the establishment of a bourgeois-democratic state, based on universal suffrage”. 21 Prior to the April Theses this was something all Russian Social Democrats, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, agreed upon; the only disagreement was over which social class was going to achieve it. The Mensheviks held to the view that the Russian Revolution would be a bourgeois revolution led by the bourgeoisie while the Bolsheviks believed that the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and supine to lead a revolution against the Tsar and therefore that the workers would be forced to take the leadership role and bring about the bourgeois revolution. Only the outlier Trotsky pointed out the Achilles heel in this old Bolshevik perspective, namely, that once the working class had achieved political domination they would no longer meekly put up with their continued economic enslavement. His theory of permanent revolution, first stated in 1906, starkly posed the question: Why should the proletariat, once in power and controlling the means of coercion, continue to tolerate capitalist exploitation? In other words the very logic of its position would oblige it to take collectivist and socialist measures: “It would be the greatest utopianism to think that the proletariat, having been raised to political domination by the internal mechanism of a bourgeois revolution, can, even if it so desires, limit its mission to the creation of republican-democratic conditions for the social domination of the bourgeoisie”. 22

Marot meticulously shows how Lih gives a flawed interpretation of the old Bolshevik scenario. The latter was predicated not on two stages but only one, namely the overthrow of Tsarism and its replacement by a provisional government heavily dominated by the RSDLP. In 1905 this perspective was never put to the test because no provisional government ever materialised. However, for those holding to the continuity of the old Bolshevik scenario, Lenin does, somewhat inconveniently, present the concept of two stages of revolution. On 7 March 1917 in his “First Letter From Afar” he writes: “The proletariat, utilising the peculiarities of the present situation, can and will proceed, first, to the achievement of a democratic republic…and then to socialism, which alone can give the war-weary people peace, bread and freedom”. 23 A month later in the April Theses Lenin reiterated this perspective: “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which…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”. 24 Nevertheless, for Lih, although it may appear that Lenin is calling for a second socialist stage to the Russian Revolution he doesn’t really mean it. With a certain level of chutzpah Lih contends that by taking these statements at face value we might be tempted to read them as follows: first stage = democratic revolution, second stage = socialist revolution. How does Lih get around the very possibility of reading Lenin’s words precisely in this fashion? He simply rewrites them by framing them, as he puts it, in “a firm grounding in the old Bolshevik scenario”. Lenin’s words should now be read as follows:

First stage = the immediate post-tsarist government of revolutionary chauvinists who will try to limit revolutionary transformation as much as possible.

Second stage = a narodnaia vlast [people’s uprising] that will put the party of the proletariat in power and carry out the democratic revolution to the end. 25

The first thing to notice is that in Lih’s new interpretation the word socialism, with which Lenin specifically concludes his “First Letter from Afar” and which he identifies as the political vision underpinning the whole necessity for a second stage of the revolution, now disappears. But more immediately, by insisting on two stages Lenin is decisively breaking with the old Bolshevik scenario. It is because Lih does not accept this that Lenin’s actual words have to be rewritten and then represented as two halves of the same old Bolshevik bourgeois democratic whole. To repeat once more, under the old Bolshevik scenario there was never any mandate to overthrow the provisional government, nor could there have been. The goal of old Bolshevism (and indeed Menshevism) was to overthrow Tsarism, not a provisional government, “whether it was soviet-based or not or whether it was revolutionary or not”. 26 Until Lenin’s arrival the question of a second stage, of consciously focusing on preparing for a socialist revolution, was never seriously engaged with. The April Theses helped to break this log-jam because it recognised very quickly that the actual provisional government of February 1917 was made up of reactionary chauvinists, not even the lesser evil of “revolutionary chauvinists”, and therefore was utterly different to the one anticipated by old Bolshevism.

It is important to make clear that when Lenin was advocating moving as speedily as possible to the second stage of the revolution this should not be confused with the Menshevik and subsequent Stalinist two stages theory. The latter held to a rigid and predetermined view which continued, throughout the 20th century, to see the bourgeois democratic revolution as a distinctly separate historical epoch. According to the two stages theory, therefore, the working class and consequently socialism must always wait. This vulgar evolutionism was to have devastating repercussions ranging from the Chinese Revolution 1925-1927, Spain 1936 even later on to Indonesia 1965 or Chile 1973. In all likelihood, had the Bolsheviks not led a successful socialist revolution in October 1917 a similar right wing military dictatorship and bloodbath would have ensued.

Of course it is true that after the February 1917 Revolution society had progressed compared to the Tsarist state. Indeed Lenin referred to Russia as “now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world” in terms of formally recognised legal rights and the absence of violence towards the masses. 27 But, prior to Lenin’s arrival back in Russia, one thing both old Bolshevism and Menshevism agreed upon was that “carrying out the democratic revolution to the end” was understood to mean bourgeois-democratic rather than socialist revolution. Notwithstanding the April Theses Lih primarily endorses the view that the October Revolution was not a socialist revolution at all—but the completion of the project of pushing the bourgeois democratic revolution to its furthermost limit. Once this point is conceded the rest of the old Bolshevik scenario must also logically follow. Thus a constituent assembly would be set up which would in turn found a republic. The provisional government, having done its job, would dissolve itself and the RSDLP, following the example of Kautsky’s Social Democratic Party in Germany, would take its place as a social-democratic “revolutionary” opposition to capitalism in what would be a capitalist state. At this point Lenin might as well have thrown his copy of The State and Revolution out of the window of an unsealed train going back to Switzerland. Alongside it, he could at the same time have discarded the following passage from his “Third Letter from Afar” written just immediately prior to his arrival in Russia:

We need a state. But not the kind of state the bourgeoisie has created everywhere, from constitutional monarchies to the most democratic republics. And in this we differ from the opportunists and Kautskyites of the old, and decaying, socialist parties, who have distorted, or have forgotten, the lessons of the Paris Commune and the analysis of these lessons made by Marx and Engels.

We need a state but not the kind the bourgeoisie needs, with organs of government in the shape of a police force, an army and a bureaucracy (officialdom) separate from and opposed to the people. All bourgeois revolutions merely perfected this state machine, merely transferred it from the hands of one party to those of another. 28

Apart from the fact that Lih does not give any consideration to this passage, what he does say is that “a soviet republic was the most advanced form of democratic republic”. 29 But as we can see this is not Lenin’s position. He plainly says even “the most democratic republic” is still a bourgeois state and thus systematically a state based on class exploitation and capitalist relations of production.

Just using the term “democratic revolution” as Lih does can to a large extent be equivocal and leave the political regime empty of social content. As early as 1884 Engels had seen through this delusion when he wrote about the role of “pure democracy”:

When the moment of revolution comes, of its acquiring a temporary importance as the most radical bourgeois party…and as the final sheet-anchor of the whole bourgeois and even feudal regime…the whole reactionary mass falls in behind it and strengthens it; everything which used to be reactionary behaves as democratic.

In any case, our sole adversary on the day of the crisis and on the day after the crisis will be the whole collective reaction which will group itself around pure democracy, and this, I think, should not be lost sight of. 30

Lenin echoed Engels’s warning when he said that “to be revolutionaries, even democrats, with Nicholas [the Tsar] removed, is no great merit. Revolutionary democracy is no good at all; it is a mere phrase. It covers up rather than lays bare the antagonisms of class interests”. 31 Clearly, the new editors of Pravda , the Bolshevik newspaper, were unaware of this. Kamenev’s co-editor Stalin wrote on 29 March: “Insofar as the provisional government fortifies the steps of the revolution to that extent we must support it; but insofar as it is counter-revolutionary, support to the provisional government is not permissible”. 32

This completely ignores the fact that the most powerful agent of counter-revolution at that point in time was this very same provisional government. This was the reason Lenin called for its overthrow, not just militant opposition to it. This level of political confusion, simply speaking of a division of labour between the provisional government and the soviets, not only overlooked class antagonisms but had already had a disorientating effect on the Bolsheviks. At a session of the whole of the Petrograd Soviet on 2 March only 15 out of the 40 Bolshevik delegates present voted against the transfer of power to the provisional government. 33 Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Lih’s claim that old Bolshevism was politically geared to the overthrow of the provisional government.

In December 1915 Lenin had already noted the hypocrisy of hiding behind the phrase “democratic revolution”. Julius Martov had made a statement proclaiming: “It is self-evident that if the present crisis should lead to the victory of a democratic revolution, to a republic, then the character of the war would radically change.” Lenin pulled no punches in his withering attack on what amounted to a precursor of revolutionary defencism:

All this is a shameless lie. Martov could not but have known that a democratic revolution and a republic means a bourgeois-democratic republic. The character of this war between the bourgeois and imperialist great powers would not change a jot were the military-autocratic and feudal imperialism to be swept away in one of these countries. That is because in such conditions, a purely bourgeois imperialism would not vanish, but would only gain strength. 34

Lenin returned to reinforce the same point after the February Revolution when he wrote: “The slightest concession to revolutionary defencism is a betrayal of socialism , a complete renunciation of internationalism , no matter by what fine phrases and ‘practical’ considerations it may be justified”. 35 By this time, as will be shown below, he could just as well have had Kamenev in his sights as much as Martov. What Lenin was attacking here was the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary Party assertion that, with the Tsarist autocracy toppled, it was now justifiable to argue to carry on fighting the war under the banner of defending the gains of the revolution—hence revolutionary defencism. All of this, of course, was subterfuge. The new provisional government was perfectly happy to endorse the concept of revolutionary defencism because it helped to provide it cover while it continued to espouse the predatory war goals of the previous Tsarist regime. By contrast, revolutionary defeatism held to the view that the main enemy for every working class was its own imperialist-minded ruling class, be it a Tsarist ruling class or a bourgeois one. For Lenin the proletariat could never gain anything discernible out of a capitalist war. The choice was always between class struggle and its own immiseration and exploitation.

The real inheritors of old Bolshevism were the Mensheviks. This became apparent when they adopted the Bolshevik position of 1905 by entering the provisional government in May 1917, thus giving a proletarian stamp of approval to the bourgeois democratic revolution. Lenin’s intervention with the April Theses helped to drag the Bolsheviks back from passively going along the same route.

Lih writes that at their March 1917 conference, prior to Lenin’s arrival, the Bolsheviks had mulled over various formulas in regard to dealing with the provisional government. These included: “offering support ‘insofar as’ the provisional government carried out revolutionary measures, or imposing strict kontrol over the actions of the government, or supporting any revolutionary measures that the government undertook but not the government itself”. 36 But surely Marot is correct when he says that in April 1917: “Lenin will oppose these formulas not on the grounds of their lack of effectiveness, but because the formulas all effectively assume that the boundaries of the bourgeois-democratic revolution are sacrosanct, along with the bourgeois state”. 37 In reference to imposing “ kontrol ” over the actions of the provisional government (by the soviets), what he refers to as the “ kontrol ” tactic, Lih does concede that this was an issue of dispute among the Bolsheviks but in his view not a very profound one. It was really the striving to find “the best method for achieving the old Bolshevik goal of overthrowing the provisional government in favour of a soviet-based provisional revolutionary government”. 38

However, Marot, like Lih a fluent Russian linguist, maintains that this was not what was at stake. He argues that “ kontrol ” means exactly that: “control”, not overthrow. If the heart of the dispute was about choosing the best tactic in order to control the provisional government then indeed it was not a very profound one. If it was about whether or not to overthrow it then it is a strategic issue of an entirely different order. Lenin recognised this in his report to the Seventh Congress on 24 April: “To control you must have power…control without power is an empty petty-bourgeois phrase that hampers the progress of the Russian revolution”. 39

Up to 1917 the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, believed a very long and protracted struggle would be required eventually to get rid of Tsarism even when a revolutionary situation was underway. But when it actually came about the collapse of Tsarism happened astonishingly quickly. This dramatic development required a rapid re-assessment of the changing situation, involving a considerable amount of improvisation, as well as a completely fresh perspective involving a reorientation of the party that would inevitably necessitate a break from the old Bolshevik scenario. Even as late as October 1915 Lenin was still talking about consummation of the bourgeois democratic revolution as being the main task facing the Russian working class and arguing the “old Bolshevik” line that it was still “admissible for Social Democrats to join a provisional revolutionary government together with the democratic petty bourgeoisie”. 40 But after February 1917 there was no point in doggedly maintaining a strategy suited to a scenario that no longer applied. Unlike 1905 or 1915, Tsarism was now defunct. The old world had collapsed; the “reactionary chauvinist” provisional government had taken over as the official government. What mattered to Lenin now was how the Bolsheviks could best take advantage of this dramatic outcome. Lih appears to miss the key point when he writes of the Bolsheviks’ various options and formulas: “the spirit in which Bolshevik speakers proposed these formulas was diametrically opposed to the spirit of similar formulas coming from the moderate socialists”. 41 In other words, although the Bolsheviks may have been more forthright and strident in their propaganda vis-à-vis the provisional government, they were still nevertheless, as Lih concedes, advocating “similar formulas”. As Marot writes: “If this is so—and it is so—how can Lih say that the old Bolsheviks are for overthrowing the provisional government even before Lenin’s arrival? How can he tell the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks apart at this juncture? Not by examining the documentary evidence, where these formulae appear”. 42

The fallout from the April Theses

Given the general level of theoretical and strategic malaise among the Bolsheviks, Lenin’s April Theses went down like the proverbial lead balloon. The party’s Petrograd committee voted by 13 to two to reject it and the Bolshevik committees in Moscow and Kiev soon followed suit. In a piece signed by Kamenev, the editorial of Pravda commented: “As for the general scheme of comrade Lenin, it seems to us unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois democratic revolution is ended, and counts upon an immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution”. 43 Kamenev, who Lih quite rightly identifies as the embodiment of “old Bolshevism”, argued forcefully that “Lenin is wrong when he says that the bourgeois democratic revolution is finished… The classical relics of feudalism, the landed estates are not yet liquidated. The state is not transformed into a democratic society… It is early to say that the bourgeois democracy has exhausted all its possibilities”. 44

Was Kamenev’s position really so different from that of the Mensheviks? This is what their newspaper Rabochaya Gazeta said on 6 April 1917, two days after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station:

The revolution can successfully struggle against reaction and force it out of its position only so long as it is able to remain within the limits which are determined by the objective necessity (the state of the productive forces, the level of mentality of the masses of people corresponding to it etc.). One cannot render a better service to reaction than by disregarding those limits and by making attempts at breaking them. 45

The Menshevik leader Georgi Plekhanov repeatedly quoted Karl Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and used it to mock the Bolsheviks for trying to leapfrog into socialism: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society”. 46

Indeed, before changing his mind, Lenin himself had stuck pretty much to this script. In his massive and meticulous study The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899 it was his considered view that, as Russia was still in the early stages of capitalist development, this provided an objective basis for a bourgeois-democratic limitation to the revolutionary process.

But Lenin in April 1917 was not Lenin in 1899, far less Marx in 1859. The big picture was by now markedly different and therefore strategy had to adapt as well. The problem with both the “old Bolsheviks” and the Mensheviks was that their positions had nothing whatsoever to say about Lenin’s justifications for presenting his April Theses . These proceeded from his analysis of imperialism, not from his specific investigation into Russia written 20 years previously. Those material conditions through which the transition to socialism could be accomplished had by now assuredly “matured in the womb of the old society itself”. To quote Marx’s preface more fully than Plekhanov’s and the Mensheviks’ selective usage: “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation ”. 47 By 1917 the material conditions for revolution were palpably in the course of formation in Russia; as Neil Harding has put it, “imperialism or finance capitalism, had itself at last produced precisely those mechanisms which for the first time enabled the administration of things to be accomplished by the mass of people in and through their own self-activity”. 48 For example, cartels and trusts had concentrated and socialised production. Railways, postal and telegraph communications had contributed to establishing the infrastructure necessary to accomplish the task of socialising the basic structure of the economy. In addition large banks had rationalised and concentrated the productive base of society and provided the means for an accurate universal form of book-keeping and accountancy. Against the background of these developments it is hard to disagree with Harding’s assessment that: “within this society, Lenin argued, the material conditions had long previously matured not only for the overthrow of capitalism as an economic structure but, in certain senses, for the transcendence of the state which socialism entailed”. 49

Alexei Rykov, a longstanding and respected Bolshevik underground organiser, profoundly disagreed with Lenin and maintained that the actual socialist transformation still had to come from Europe or the United States. Lenin’s rejoinder clearly shows his new thinking: “Comrade Rykov says that socialism has to come from other countries with more developed industry. But that’s not right. No one can say who will begin and who will end. That’s not Marxism but a parody of Marxism”. 50 Rykov also asserted what was patently the prevailing view of the Bolsheviks, that: “gigantic revolutionary tasks stand before us, but the fulfilment of these tasks does not carry us beyond the framework of the bourgeois regime”. 51

Mikhail Kalinin, another stalwart of old Bolshevism who had joined the RSDLP in 1898, propounded: “I belong to the old Bolshevik Leninists, and I consider that the old Leninism has not by any means proved good-for-nothing in the present peculiar moment, and I am astonished at the declaration of Comrade Lenin that the old Bolsheviks have become an obstacle at the present moment”. 52 The Bolshevik trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky, another political heavyweight, was also not prepared to shift from the view which he believed, with some justification, that Lenin himself had held since 1905: “The democratic dictatorship is our foundation stone. We ought to organise the power of the proletariat and the peasants, and we ought to distinguish this from the Commune, since that means the power of the proletariat alone”. 53 Lenin, however, remained unmoved by these bonds to the past. Even before his arrival back in Russia in April 1917 he took it as self-evident that the European revolution against imperialism was on the immediate agenda. The objective economic base was ripe for socialism and three years of bloodletting had made millions conscious of the need to overthrow the entire system that had wrought so much death and ruination. Central to the April Theses was the contention that the first socialist revolution would have immense repercussions throughout Europe. Indeed, Lenin based his whole political strategy on the expectation that revolution in Russia would act as the detonator of a general European explosion. Against the background of this analysis he forcefully asserted that: “One must know how to adapt schemes to facts rather than repeat words regarding a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ in general, words which have become meaningless… No, that formula is antiquated. It is worthless. It is dead. And all attempts to revive it will be in vain”. 54 Moreover, he added:

Whoever speaks now only of a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” is behind the times, consequently he has in effect gone over to the side of the petty bourgeoisie and is against the proletarian class struggle. He deserves to be consigned to the archive of “Bolshevik” pre-revolutionary antiques (which might be called the archive of “old Bolsheviks”). 55

For Lenin the old Bolshevik perspective of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry had already been completed. Indeed, it had become a living reality but not in the way it was originally envisaged: “According to the old way of thinking the rule of the bourgeoisie could and should be followed by the rule of the proletariat and the peasantry by their dictatorship. In real life things have already turned out differently; there has been an extremely original, novel and unprecedented interlacing of the one with the other”. 56

What Lenin meant by this was that the supposedly “official” provisional government representing the rule of the bourgeoisie existed side by side with the soviets. The latter represented the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasants (the batraki ) represented in their millions in the uniform of the Russian army. Indeed in St Petersburg the power was very much in the hands of the workers and soldiers: “the new government is not using and cannot use violence against them, because there is no police, no army standing apart from the people, no officialdom standing all powerful above the people. This is a fact—the kind of fact that is characteristic of a state of the Paris Commune type”. 57

Lenin’s main contention was that prior to February 1917 the original old Bolshevik formula envisaged, in the forthcoming Russian Revolution, “only a relation of classes and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation”. 58 But from the earliest days such an institution did actually exist, namely the connected system of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies which lay at the heart of the revolution. The problem was that the majority in the soviets, far from wielding the power they possessed, were in the process of “surrendering helplessly to petty-bourgeois revolution…voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie” and making themselves “an appendage of the bourgeoisie”. 59 Continued commitment to the now obsolete old Bolshevik formula would ensure that this process carried on. The Bolsheviks would be neither theoretically nor organisationally equipped to stand against it, let alone counteract it. Lenin believed this corrosive development was already in train.

All of this is not to say that Lenin was in favour of an immediate seizure of power and initiation of the socialist revolution, at least not before winning a Bolshevik majority in the soviets—a fact he explicitly stated in point eight of the April Theses : “It is not our immediate task to introduce socialism”. 60 Lenin was forced to re-emphasise this point because Kamenev, in his first intervention in the April debates, argued that the call for the overthrow of the provisional government and transference of power to the soviets would “disorganise the revolution”. 61

Lih considers that the old Bolshevik position was to overthrow the provisional government at the earliest opportunity. But this is not the stance that Kamenev, the epitome of old Bolshevism, took. Instead, when the Petrograd Committee actually did raise the slogan “Down with the provisional government” on 21 April, far from supporting this campaign and overthrowing the provisional government at the earliest opportunity, Kamenev was quick to focus on it as an example of adventurism and vacillation by the party. In his winding up speech at the April Conference Lenin agreed with Kamenev that the party had vacillated but the vacillation had been: “away from the revolutionary policy… In what did our adventurism consist? It was the attempt to resort to forcible measures”. 62 The problem with this particular situation, Lenin argued, was that the balance of forces was still an unknown quantity: “We did not know to what extent the masses had swung to our side during that anxious moment. If it had been a strong swing things would have been different”. 63 In such a case, we can presume, the slogan might well have been legitimate. In Lenin’s view the reason for vacillation had been organisational weakness, a failure of democratic centralism and of revolutionary discipline: “Our decisions are not being carried out by everyone”. 64 What was meant to be a peaceful reconnoitring of the enemy’s forces was undermined by the Petersburg Committee moving too quickly to the left and giving battle prematurely: “We advanced the slogan for peaceful demonstrations but several comrades from the Petrograd Committee issued a different slogan. We annulled it but could not stop it in time to prevent the masses following the slogan of the Petrograd Committee”. 65 Nevertheless Lenin insisted that the line marked out was correct and that: “in future we shall make every effort to achieve an organisation in which there will be no Petrograd ‘Committee-men’ to disobey the Central Committee”. 66 Clearly a bit more centralisation in the party was required—not in opposition to democracy but as an essential condition for it to exist.

At this point what was of equal importance to Lenin, as much as the question of organisation or—for that matter—any alleged “bourgeois democratic stage”, was gauging the prevailing level of consciousness of the Russian working class. At the end of the April debates Lenin placed the emphasis on “patient explanation”: “there is not the slightest doubt that, as a class, the proletariat and semi-proletariat are not interested in the war. They are influenced by tradition and deception. They still lack political experience. Therefore our task is one of patient explanation”. 67 The task now was two-fold. While the Bolsheviks remained in a minority they had both to criticise and expose errors but at the same time advocate the strategic and political importance of: transferring state power to the soviets “so that people may overcome their mistakes by experience”. 68 Lenin in effect had put a reasoned wager on the majority of workers rapidly becoming disillusioned with the moderate orientation of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The circumstances of the April Theses have to be set firmly in the context of the pull of rapprochement with the Mensheviks and the wider gravitational drag of left reformism. They cannot be dismissed as much ado about nothing. Lenin’s reaction is perhaps the most important example of him “bending the stick”—purposely over-emphasising his position.

Kamenev was still wedded to carrying on fighting the imperialist war under the guise of “revolutionary defencism”. Indeed he had already displayed his disavowal of Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism during a trial in a Tsarist court in 1914. In an editorial in Pravda on 15 March 1917 he went so far as to insist that: “Soldiers and sailors remain steadfast at their posts and answer the enemy bullet for bullet and shell with shell”. 69 All of this was couched in terms of displaying practical unity with the provisional government insofar as it struggled against Tsarist reaction and counter-revolution. Nevertheless it is clear that, while Lenin was correctly convinced that the only road to peace lay in the overthrow of the provisional government, Kamenev and other leading old Bolsheviks were prepared to give succour to a government that was still thoroughly committed to the war aims of the Entente alliance that had bound Tsarist Russia to British and French imperialism.

At the April debates Lenin explained how any unity with the Mensheviks on their terms would have meant not only the continuation of the war but also retreat on the question of land reform as well as the re-establishment of managerial control in the workplace. This would have not only led to demoralisation among the revolution’s most enthusiastic supporters but would have also raised the confidence of counter-revolutionary forces.

We must return briefly to the issue of the “ kontrol tactic”. Lih acknowledges that there were what he calls disagreements in the April debates but he puts much of this down to misunderstandings, deliberate or otherwise, rather than any deep cleavage in strategy. He argues correctly that the only Bolsheviks who openly advocated unity with the Mensheviks (on the basis that the February Revolution had made past differences redundant) were a small group around Wladimir Woytinsky who had left the party just prior to Lenin’s arrival. He assesses that for this group and other “moderate socialists” kontrol in practice meant demonstrating that soviet power was not necessary.

However, for Kamenev, Stalin and other “old Bolsheviks” the opposite was the case. Their strategy, according to Lih, was to show by what today might be called transitional demands: “that the provisional government was not going to carry out what it claimed it was going to do, and to show the workers and peasants that they are not going to get anywhere unless they replace the government with their own”. 70 Lih cites as an example the demand by Kamenev for the provisional government to publish secret treaties knowing that they would not be prepared to do this. Their refusal to do so would thus expose them to the masses as being against a policy of peace. All of this is set in contrast to Lenin’s “patient explanation” which can be viewed as rather passive. In other words, Lih proposes that it is Lenin, not the old Bolsheviks, who needed shaking up. He writes:

Those Bolsheviks who, like Kamenev, were opposed to Lenin were arguing that his opposition to the provisional government was too empty, too formal—too much like just sitting there saying that it is an imperialist government. They asked: how do we get across the message that an imperialist government is bad? Let’s put across some specific demands to expose this government. 71

But, as noted above, Marot argues that kontrol meant control. And for Lenin: “There can be no control without power. To control by means of resolutions etc is sheer nonsense”. 72 However, for Lih the interpretation is more nuanced; along the lines of keeping a watching-brief or as he puts it: “checking up on” the provisional government. 73 But, if correct, this can hardly be said to be any more vigorous than Lenin’s supposed “passive” patient explanation.

Did “patient explanation” really mean, as Lih suggests, “just sitting there saying it is an imperialist government”. 74 Manifestly in practice it really meant party members going to the masses, concentrating on the need for taking the vlast (power) from below and directly confronting the fact that despite its democratic trappings the provisional government was still a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie determined to keep power in the hands of the capitalist class. Hammering this point home systematically and persistently at the grassroots in the workplace, the streets, the barracks, as well as in the soviets was far more subversive than “clever” tactical manoeuvres to catch the opposition out. For Lenin the provisional government was already debased as things stood. Any support or denunciation of it was not contingent on any further actions on its part. Moreover Kamenev’s half-baked attempts at posing transitional demands were never going to be a substitute for the real thing: “peace, bread and land”. Instead Lenin was banking on the perspective of a deteriorating state of affairs both at the front and at home and on the continued resistance of the stratum of workers who had risen to their feet in the upwards years of 1912-14 following the massacre of 500 miners in the Lena goldfields. Even prior to the April debates Lenin had argued that:

All countries are on the brink of ruin; people must realise this; there is no way out except through a socialist revolution. The government must be overthrown, but not everybody understands this correctly. So long as the provisional government has the backing of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, you cannot “simply” overthrow it. The only way it can and must be overthrown is by winning over the majority in the Soviets. 75

On this point it is worth noting that even as late as mid-June at the first All-Russia Congress of Soviets there were still only 105 Bolshevik delegates out of 882. 76 The pressure to accommodate to the majority must have been enormous. Patient explanation, or as Trotsky put it, “bringing the consciousness of the masses into correspondence with that situation into which the historic process had driven them”, 77 was one of the elements of practical agitation by which the social base of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries operating in the soviets could be undermined.

All of this soon came to pass. By mid-summer the provisional government’s demand for increased conscription into the army coupled with mass desertions following its orders, under pressure from its fellow imperialist allies, to resume offensive military operations began to erode its support base. Within the Bolshevik Party Kamenev’s de facto “revolutionary defencism” position was also being undercut. Kamenev, if he truly was the embodiment of old Bolshevism, never really seemed to learn from this. In regard to the so-called Democratic Conference in September, an event actually called by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and dismissed by Lenin as “idiotic babbling”, 78 he severely criticised Kamenev for his “constitutional” approach: “Comrade Kamenev was wrong in delivering the first speech at the conference in a purely ‘constitutional’ spirit when he raised the foolish question of confidence or non-confidence in the government.” What he should have been concentrating on was exposing the widely known truth of provisional government leader Alexander Kerensky’s “secret pacts with the Kornilov gang”. 79 His wrath was also aimed at the 136 Bolshevik delegates. “The Bolsheviks should have walked out…and not allowed themselves to be caught by the conference trap set to divert the people’s attention from serious questions…the Bolshevik delegation ought to have gone to the factories and the barracks; that was the proper place for delegates”. 80

A few weeks later, on the very eve of the October Revolution, Kamenev alongside Grigori Zinoviev publicly denounced the plans for insurrection in the Menshevik press. There is too long a trail here to suggest that his and the old Bolsheviks’ dispute with Lenin over the April Theses was merely one of mutual misunderstanding. There was a right-leaning wing and a left-leaning wing among the Bolshevik leaders. Kamenev rep.resented one, Lenin the other.

Socialism and Bolshevik propaganda

Finally, Lih sets great store in the claim that Lenin in reality played down the vision of socialism as being central in the build-up to the October Revolution. We need to be aware that at this time, during the summer months of 1917 and encompassing the dramatic events of the July Days, when sections of the Bolsheviks were drawn towards a premature insurrection, Lenin was very wary of being tactically deflected into an abstract cul de sac of arguments about the nature of socialism. He was especially concerned not to overlook exposing what he termed the plunder of the state such as the 500 percent profits being made from war supplies: “The bourgeoisie want nothing better than to answer the people’s queries about the scandalous profits of the war supplies deliverers, and about economic dislocation, with ‘learned’ arguments about the ‘utopian’ character of socialism”. 81

Nevertheless Lih is content to ignore this context. He approvingly quotes the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, who stated in his memoir of 1917: “Was there any socialism in this [the Bolsheviks’] platform? No, I maintain that in a direct form the Bolsheviks never harped to the masses on socialism as the object and task of a soviet government; nor did the masses in supporting the Bolsheviks, even think about socialism”. 82 In endorsing Sukhanov’s view, Lih produces evidence in the form of a study of a sample of 50 leaflets issued by the Moscow organisation of the Bolsheviks between April and October 1917. Lih contends that, in the three months preceding the October Revolution, “socialism in general only gets a passing mention…in the ten or so leaflets…issued during and immediately after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. Neither socialism nor any kind of socialist measure are mentioned anywhere”. 83 Setting aside Lih’s reference to “the Bolshevik coup”, surely to a large extent all this misses the point. What was of much greater significance was that of all the political organisations the Bolsheviks alone called for “all power to the soviets” recognising them as the social force that could bring about socialism. This was a slogan that the political logic of pre-April 1917 Bolshevism, with the residue of its Kautskyan legacy still hanging over it, could never have advanced. Marot rightly contends that:

Whether they often or seldom called for it is not critical. No other political formation called for it. No other party called for workers’ power. At this point, in the summer and autumn of 1917, long after the conclusion of the April debates, the Bolsheviks were confident that if the workers came to power it would mean the overthrow of the provisional government since there could be no stable soviet workers’ state even under the most democratic bourgeois rule. 84

Lih cites the 50 Moscow Bolshevik leaflets in support of his view that an orientation towards “socialism” or a socialist revolution was not a necessary pre-condition for a revolutionary overthrow of the provisional government, a view that was certainly held by Kamenev. But is this the only factor in play here? In trying to avoid the pitfalls of either being rigidly dogmatic on the one hand or prosaic on the other concerning the overall conceptual rigour of their political message, the Bolsheviks knew what every revolutionary socialist activist, before or since, knows, that if they were to reach beyond their primary circle of supporters and connect with the workers and peasants they were trying to win over, they would need to adopt a more everyday style of language in their pamphlets. After all, the largest party in Russia was also the party whose vast majority held the greatest ideological fear of seeing the revolution develop towards socialism—the (misleadingly named) petty-bourgeois populist Socialist Revolutionary Party. In his concluding speech to the April Conference of the Bolsheviks on 29 April Lenin went some way to distinguish between party “political” resolutions and party agitational and propaganda pamphlets. He summed it up as follows:

Our resolutions are not written with a view to the broad masses, but they will serve to unify the activities of our agitators and propagandists, and the reader will find in them guidance in his work. We have to speak to the millions; we must draw fresh forces from amongst the masses, we must call for more developed class-conscious workers who would popularise our theses in a way the masses would understand. We shall endeavour in our pamphlets to present our resolutions in a more popular form, and hope that our comrades will do the same thing locally. The proletariat will find in our resolutions material to guide it in its movement towards the second stage of our revolution. 85

It is, of course, also perfectly possible that within this context of “patient explanation” the Moscow comrades didn’t always get it quite right.

When Lenin addressed the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917, the day after the provisional government was dispatched into the dustbin of history, he finished his report by announcing: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order”. 86 He did not say “we shall now proceed to complete the democratic revolution to the end”. Lih’s continual discounting of Lenin’s interventionist role in the Bolshevik Party leads him to emphasise the “inner continuity” of the party while depriving the April Theses of any lasting significance in actively sharpening the party’s revolutionary edge. Lenin was focused on active agency and the ability to exploit a chaotic situation, not simply waiting passively for the “Marxian” laws of economic determinism to clarify the situation to everyone’s satisfaction. Trotsky seems to have a far greater grasp than Lih of the relationship between the two when he writes:

The Party could fulfil its mission only after understanding it. For that Lenin was needed. Until his arrival, not one of the Bolshevik leaders dared to make a diagnosis of the revolution… His divergence from the ruling circles of the Bolsheviks meant the struggle of the future of the party against its past. If Lenin had not been artificially separated from the party by the conditions of emigration and war, the external mechanics of the crisis would not have been so dramatic, and would not have overshadowed to such a degree the inner continuity of the party development. 87

Lenin was never the type of leader to allow himself to be held back by what he viewed as shibboleths or dogmatic orthodoxy even if such ideas were held by large swathes of old Bolsheviks; the thoughtful, loyal, resilient but also conservative backbone of the party. He would have been well aware that without the courage and sacrifices of these comrades there would have been no Bolshevik Party and without a party no realistic prospect of achieving a socialist revolution. But, just as importantly, he also knew that a “Leninist” party could only be successful when it substantially grasped strategically as well as theoretically the context within which it was working and changed accordingly. The key question here was did an advanced revolutionary class exist or did it not? In delivering the April Theses Lenin did not cease to be a “Leninist” or in many ways, for that matter, an old Bolshevik. What he did in Trotsky’s words: “was to throw off the worn-out shell of Bolshevism in order to summon its nucleus to a new life”. 88 When Lenin delivered the April Theses we see him in practice arriving at the same conclusion as that which Trotsky had theorised ten years earlier. The theory of permanent revolution and the April Theses now dovetailed together. Lih’s assessment of old Bolshevism makes it virtually indistinguishable from Menshevism. Without the political and strategic renewal, the break in gradualness, spurred on by the April Theses —“Leaps, Leaps, Leaps” as Lenin noted in the margins of Hegel’s Science of Logic —the revolution would have been halted at its bourgeois democratic stage and then been rapidly beaten back. 89

It is not the purpose of this article to delve into the debates concerning the precise meaning of Leninist or Leninism. There are already immense amounts of literature and articles covering this topic ranging from the proverbial number of angels on the head of a pin to much more thoughtful and contextual appraisals. A good example of the latter is Paul Le Blanc’s Unfinished Leninism , where the Stalinist usurpation and subsequent destruction of Lenin’s worldview are largely taken as read. For my part I am content at present to locate my use of these terms within the commentary of the Russian literary critic D S Mirsky: “Leninism is not identical with the sum of Lenin’s outlook. The Marxist precedes in him the creator of Leninism, and the vindication and re-establishment of genuine Marxism was one of his principal tasks in life”. 90 As we enter the sociopathic age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the persistent failure of neoliberalism as well as that of social-democratic reformism to confront and deal with the historic levels of inequality that global capitalism is creating has produced an intense stirring of discontent and protest. The spectre of a re-run of the 1930s or even a return to the inter-imperialist rivalry reminiscent of the years prior to 1914, but this time with nuclear weapons, is a chilling prospect. With the recent revelation that eight individuals have a combined wealth greater than that of the bottom three and a half billion of the planet’s population 91 the ideals of the April Theses and the October Revolution remain unfinished business.

1 Sukhanov, 1984, p280. Nikolai Sukhanov was a Menshevik who witnessed Lenin’s return to Russia.

2 Dates in this article refer to the old style or Julian calendar which was 13 days behind the western Gregorian calendar. Russia switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1918.

3 The soviets or workers’ councils comprised delegates elected directly from workplaces, army regiments and local communities.

4 Also known as “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution”—Lenin, 1917c.

5 Lenin, 1905, pp17-28.

6 Lenin, 1902.

7 Lenin, 1905, p20.

8 Marxism on the State provided the draft for Lenin’s most insightful contribution to Marxism: The State and Revolution , written in August-September 1917.

9 Lih, 2011.

10 Lih, 2011, p199.

11 Lih, 2011, p199.

12 Trotsky, 1932.

13 Corr and Jenkins, 2014.

14 Lih, 2011, p217.

15 Marot, 2014, p151. Marot argues that for Lih “to talk about one is to talk about the other and vice-versa”—Marot, 2014, p144.

16 The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, within which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were both factions. It was not until the 1912 Prague All-Russia Congress of the RSDLP that Bolshevism effectively crystallised as a distinct party.

17 Riddell, 2017.

18 Lih, 2011, p222.

19 Lenin, 1917a, p241.

20 Lih, 2011, p199.

21 Marot, 2014, p158.

22 Trotsky, 1931.

23 Lenin, 1917b, p308.

24 Lenin, 1917c, p21.

25 Lih, 2011, p218.

26 Marot, 2014, p163.

27 Lenin, 1917c, p21.

28 Lenin, 1917d, pp325-326.

29 Lih, 2011, p222.

30 Engels, 1884.

31 Lenin, 1917e, p149.

32 Quoted in Trotsky, 1937.

33 A G Shlyapnikov, referred to in Cliff, 1976, p98.

34 Lenin, 1915a, p435.

35 Lenin, 1917f, p65.

36 Lih, 2011, p216.

37 Marot, 2014, p162.

38 Lih, 2011, p230.

39 Lenin, 1917a, p232.

40 Lenin, 1915b, pp401-406.

41 Lih, 2011, p216.

42 Marot, 2014, p163.

43 Pravda , 8 April 1917.

44 Quoted in Trotsky, 1980, p319.

45 Quoted in Harding, 1978, p147.

46 Marx, 1859.

47 Marx, 1859, my emphasis.

48 Harding, 1978, p147.

49 Harding, 1978, p148.

50 Lenin, 1917a, p246.

51 Quoted in Trotsky, 1980, p325.

52 Quoted in Trotsky, 1980, p325.

53 Trotsky, 1980, p319.

54 Lenin, 1917g, pp45-51.

55 Lenin, 1917g, p46.

56 Lenin, 1917g, p46.

57 Lenin, 1917g, p47.

58 Lenin, 1917g, p45.

59 Lenin, 1917g, p47.

60 Lenin, 1917c, p23.

61 Marot, 2014, p165.

62 Lenin, 1917a, p244.

63 Lenin, 1917a, p244.

64 Lenin, 1917a, p244.

65 Lenin, 1917a, p244.

66 Lenin, 1917a, p247.

67 Lenin, 1917a, p237.

68 Lenin, 1917c, p22.

69 Rabinowitch, 1991, p36.

70 Lih, 2015, p5.

71 Lih, 2015, p5.

72 Lenin, 1917e, p153.

73 Lih, 2015, p5.

74 Lih, 2015, p5.

75 In a speech delivered at the Petrograd City Conference of the Bolsheviks on 14 April—Lenin, 1917e, p147.

76 Bunyan and Fisher, 1934, p11.

77 Trotsky, 1980, p326.

78 Lenin, 1917h, p43.

79 Lenin, 1917h, p45. By this time the “socialist” Kerensky had become prime minister and General Kornilov had become the extreme right wing commander-in-chief of the army.

80 Lenin, 1917h, p43.

81 Lenin, 1917j, p45.

82 Lih, 2011, pp234-235.

83 Lih, 2011, p238.

84 Marot, 2014, pp165-166.

85 Lenin, 1917a, p313.

86 Lenin, 1917i, introduction.

87 Trotsky, 1980, pp330-331.

88 Trotsky, 1980, p235.

89 Lenin, 1914, p123.

90 Mirsky, 1931, p192

91 Socialist Worker , 2017.

Bunyan, James, and H H Fisher, 1934, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1918 Documents and Materials (Stanford University Press).

Cliff, Tony, 1976, Lenin , volume 2, All Power to the Soviets (Pluto Press).

Corr, Kevin, and Gareth Jenkins, 2014, “The Case of the Disappearing Lenin”, International Socialism 144 (autumn), http://isj.org.uk/the-case-of-the-disappearing-lenin

Engels, Friedrich, 1884, “Letter to August Bebel in Berlin” (December), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_12_11.htm

Harding, Neil, 1978 , Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Socialist Revolutions , volume 2 (St Martin’s Press).

Lenin, V I, 1902, “What is to be Done?” in Collected Works , volume 5 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/

Lenin, V I, 1905, “Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies”, in Collected Works , volume 10 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/04b.htm

Lenin, V I, 1914, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic ”, in Collected Works , volume 38 (Philosophical Notebooks), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch01.htm

Lenin, V I, 1915a, “Social Chauvinist Policy Behind the Cover of International Phrases”, in Collected Works , volume 21 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/dec/21.htm

Lenin, V I, 1915b, “Several Theses”, in Collected Works , volume 21 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/13.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917a, “The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP(B)”, in Collected Works , volume 41 (Progress), www.marxistsfr.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf2/index.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917b, “Letters from Afar: First Letter”, in Collected Works , volume 23 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/lfafar/first.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917c, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses)”, in Collected Works , volume 24 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917d, “Letters from Afar: Third Letter”, in Collected Works , volume 23 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/lfafar/third.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917e, “The Petrograd City Conference of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks)”, in Collected Works , volume 24 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/petcconf/

Lenin, V I, 1917f, “Revolutionary Defencism and its Class Significance”, in Collected Works , volume 24 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/ch05.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917g, “Letters on Tactics”, in Collected Works , volume 24 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917h, “Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks”, in Collected Works , volume 26 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/22.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917i, “Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”, in Collected Works , volume 26 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/index.htm

Lenin, V I, 1917j, “Economic Dislocation and the Proletariat’s Struggle Against It”, in Collected Works , volume 25 (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/17.htm

Lih, Lars, 2011, “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context”, Russian History , volume 38.

Lih, Lars, 2015, “The Ironic Triumph of ‘Old Bolshevism’: The ‘April Debates’ and their Impact on Bolshevik Strategy in 1917”, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal (1 June), http://links.org.au/node/4451

Marot, John, 2014, “Lenin, Bolshevism, and Social-Democratic Political Theory: The 1905 and 1917 Soviets”, Historical Materialism , volume 22, issue 3-4.

Marx, Karl, 1859, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (Progress), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

Mirsky, D S, 1931, Lenin (Holme Press).

Rabinowitch, Alexander, 1991 [1968], Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Indiana University Press).

Riddell, John, 2017, “1917: The View from the Streets—Leaflets of the Russian Revolution”, https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/for-a-provisional-revolutionary-government-of-workers-and-poor-peasants/

Socialist Worker , 2017, “The Infamous Eight” (17 January), https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/43960/The+infamous+eight

Sukhanov, Nikolai, 1984, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record (Princeton University Press).

Trotsky, Leon, 1931, Results and Prospects , www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp08.htm

Trotsky, Leon, 1932, “Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg: Reply to the Slandering of a Revolutionist”, Militant , volume 5, number 32 and 33, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/06/luxemburg.htm

Trotsky, Leon, 1937, The Stalin School of Falsification (Pioneer Publishers), www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/ssf/sf14.htm

Trotsky, Leon, 1980 [1932], The History of the Russian Revolution , volume 1 (Pathfinder Press), www.marxists.org/ebooks/trotsky/history-of-the-russian-revolution/ebook-history-of-the-russian-revolution-v1.pdf

• Central African Republic
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• South Africa
• Western Sahara
• El Salvador
• North Korea
• South Korea
• Spanish State
• Saudi Arabia
• Bill Hunter’s Archives
• Leon Trotsky
• Marxism Alive – China
• Marxism Alive – Lenin
• Marxism Alive – Middle East
• Marxism Alive – Nahuel Moreno
• Marxism Alive – Russian Revolution
• Nahuel Moreno
• International Solidarity
• May Day 2019
• Solidarity Campaign
• IWL-FI Statements
• A brief outline of the history of the IWL-FI
• Corriente Roja – Spanish State
• Em Luta – Portugal
• MIT – Chile
• PCT – El Salvador
• PdAC – Italy
• PST – Honduras
• PST- Colombia
• PST – Peru
• PSTU – Argentina
• PSTU – Brasil
• PT – Costa Rica
• PT – Paraguay
• ART – Ecuador
• CST – Mexico
• GSO – Mexico
• LPS – Senegal
• LS – Bolivia
• ISL – Britain
• IST – Uruguay
• Kirmizi Gazete – Turkey
• Corriente Obrera
• LCT – Belgium
• LTS – Panama
• Mazdoor Inqilab – India
• Mehnat Kash Tarik – Pakistan
• POI – Russia
• UST – Venezuela
• Workers’ Voice – U.S.
• Human Rights
• 40 years of IWL-FI
• 30 years of the end of the USSR
• 200 Years of Engels
• Climate Change
• Coronavirus
• IV International – 80 Years
• Haiti Special
• Iran Special
• Revolutionary Violence
• Women & Russian Revolution
• Women Special
• Stalinism and Restoration

“ It’s a delusion, it’s the delirium of a madman!” –  (A. Bogdanov, Menshevik, referring to Lenin’s April Theses) By Francesco Ricci.   It is April 3, 1917 (April 16 of our calendar) when the so-called ‘sealed train’ that houses Lenin, Zinoviev, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, Radek and others arrives at the Finland Station. To welcome him, there is a delegation from the Petrograd Soviet, led by the Menshevik Cheidze, who gives a welcoming address. Lenin turns his back on him and heads for the crowd. Trotsky writes: “ T he speech which Lenin delivered at the Finland railway station on the socialist character of the Russian revolution was a bombshell to many [Bolshevik, the editor] leaders of the party. “ [1] Lenin, once again, explains his position to 200 militants who, on the evening of April 3, hear him in Petrograd. Among them is Nicolaj Soukhanov (Menshevik Internationalist), who in his Memoirs recounts the effect that this discourse caused: “(…) it seemed that all the elements had come out of their refuges and that the spirit of universal destruction, that did not respect limits nor doubts… hover in the room… “. When Lenin finishes speaking, applauses are heard, but the Bolshevik leaders looked puzzled. Lenin pointed at the same time to a change of strategy and the necessity, to implement the new line, of destroying the overwhelming influence of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Soviets (the Bolsheviks were a small minority at that time). Coincidentally, and just the next day, a meeting had been organized to move towards the reunification of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks… Soukhanov, who watches, writes: “ At this meeting, Lenin seemed to be the living the incarnation of splitting and the whole meaning of his discourse consisted chiefly in burying the idea of unification. “ [2] Learning with the Paris Commune Let us just take a step back. Shortly after learning of the outbreak of the February revolution, Lenin begins, from his exile in Switzerland, a battle to change radically the Party’s strategy. First, on March 6 he sent a telegram to the party: “ Our tactics: no trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is especially suspect; arming of the proletariat is the only guarantee; … no rapprochement with other parties. ” [3] In March, he writes the Letters From Afar (Pravda will publish only an edited one). At the heart of these later letters and fundamental texts, among which the April Theses stand out, of which we shall deal next, there is the example of the Paris Commune, which Lenin had studied again in those months while he was writing the so-called Blue Notebook (Marxism and the State), a collection of commented quotations of all the concepts expressed by Marx and Engels on the theme of the State, the work that will be the basis to write The State and the Revolution . [4] The revolution that is developing in Russia, says Lenin, is a socialist revolution. Therefore, the aim of the revolution is to “break the bourgeois state,” as the Parisian workers did, and to replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is, it is not a question of changing the ruler of the old state machine, but of destroying it and substituting an entirely new one for it. But to achieve this goal, it is necessary to affirm the complete independence of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie and the provisional government, which is a bourgeois government, although it is currently supported by the Soviets (where the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks have the majority). When Lenin Became a… “Trotskyist” It is not possible to appreciate in depth the changes proposed by Lenin without reminding the previous position sustained by the Bolsheviks for years. From the beginning of the century on, there were three different conceptions of the future Russian revolution [5] . The Mensheviks, in the name of a supposed “Marxist orthodoxy” (in fact, misrepresenting Marx and attributing to him a non-dialectical evolutionist conception of history), believed that Russia should go through a stage of capitalistic industrial development before the socialist revolution – after a considerable period – could succeed. Therefore, there should be a democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a subordinate ally, which would free the country from Tsarism, where social-democracy would be the left wing of the “democratic front” led by Liberals. After centuries of capitalist development, the time for socialist revolution would come. Trotsky’s position was at the opposite pole: he believed that the national bourgeoisie was incapable of achieving democratic goals and therefore foresaw a socialist revolution, led by the proletariat that would hegemonize the poor peasants, to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and assume, continually, the democratic and (on an international scale of an expanding revolution) the socialist tasks (expropriation of big industry, etc.). This would be possible because of the “uneven and combined development” of society and the international revolution that would allow Russia (like other underdeveloped countries) to “leap” a few steps, breaking an “evolutionary” stages scheme, that would be replaced by the “permanent revolution”. Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ position laid between both: the bourgeois revolution “directed to the end,” but (given the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie, tied by a thousand ties to foreign capital) led by the proletariat and the peasantry (In an “algebraic” alliance, according to Trotsky’s critique), to establish a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants.” It is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but a republic within the limits of bourgeois democracy, as a prelude to a rapid development towards the socialist revolution (its pace being dictated by the European revolution). Lenin believed, therefore, as the Mensheviks did, in a bourgeois revolution, although, unlike the Mensheviks, he managed another leadership, of workers and peasants, independent of the bourgeoisie. His program was different, too, stressing the confiscation of the land of the nobles and the Church; and a different perspective from that anticipated by the Mensheviks – there would be no centuries separating this first revolution from the successive socialist revolution. The February revolution was the confirmation (at least for those who wanted to think) that the only correct and viable conception was Trotsky’s. To guarantee the achievement of the democratic objectives (agrarian revolution, reduction of the working day, peace, the Constituent Assembly), it was necessary first to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat (supported by the poor peasants) based on the Soviets. Therefore, it was necessary to destroy the bourgeois rule, which represented an obstacle on the path to the full power of the Soviets. Lenin did not hesitate to abandon the old theory and, to great scandal of many, he began to defend, indeed, the theory that Trotsky had elaborated over ten years ago. That is why Trotsky comments: “ It is not strange that Lenin’s April Theses were condemned as Trotskyist.” [6] The Rediscovery of Dialectic in Marxism It was rightly observed by several scholars [7] that the change advocated by Lenin at the Finland station was based, from a theoretical point of view, on the study of Hegel’s Science of Logic, which Lenin began in 1914. A study he felt necessary to explain the betrayal of the Second International in World War I and to understand the complete capitulation of his masters of the past: Plekhanov and Kautsky (the latter, along with the bureaucratic deviation of the SPD, was progressively abandoning Marxism, of which he had been the “red pope” in the II International). In those months, closed in the library of Bern, Lenin discovers another Marx, decontaminated of the Feuerbachian prejudices. A dialectical Marxism (that of the Theses on Feuerbach, written by Marx in 1845), born out of the rupture with the “old materialism.” A Marxism based on the understanding of the subject-object dialectic, devoid of any causal conception, which contrasts with that mechanical determinism, which had also partially influenced him during a period (let us think about his Materialism and Empiriocriticism of 1909). It is the discovery of the true Marx, who had been distorted by his disciples and deformed by the opportunism of the Second International: the Marx who affirms “the educator must be educated” (the third Theses on Feuerbach), that is, circumstances may be altered by human action, by the class struggle, by revolutionary praxis. Lenin rediscovers Marx who claims that man makes history, even in circumstances he has not determined. In this Marx, there is no “law of historical development,” which prescribes to every people a linear evolution, no determinism. It is the rupture with the ossified Marxism of Plekhanov that, not by chance, before the October Revolution, will exclaim: “ It is the violation of all the laws of history .” It is in this crucial passage, condensed in his Philosophical Notebooks [8] that Lenin, contemplating Hegel’s books, grabs the dialectic that Marx had absorbed from Hegel and to which he had conferred a revolutionary character. Lenin should not start from scratch: he is always the only one who, since 1902, branding his vanguard party theory that brings socialism “out” of the day-to-day clash between classes, had implicitly rejected socialism understood as a mere product of the impulse of “economic laws”. In Bern, so to speak, he begins to solve a contradiction that remained in his thinking: the contradiction between the conception of the party and its program. Lenin’s Struggle to “Rearm” the Party Most of the Bolshevik leadership do not immediately understand the need for Lenin’s change. Kamenev and Stalin, the main leaders before Lenin’s arrival in Russia, remain anchored in the previous position (which they, furthermore, deformed it to the right) and believe that the Bolsheviks should provide support to the provisional government “to the extent that” it would implement certain policies; that is, it is about “pushing” the government forward. For them, the revolution lives its first stage: the “bourgeois-democratic revolution”, while the socialist one could only develop in an afterward stage. Thus, the Bolsheviks, before Lenin’s arrival, approached the Mensheviks’ positions: for example, on the question of war, the Pravda under Stalin and Kamenev repudiates the revolutionary defeatism that had characterized Bolshevism and pleases the resolution of the Social-Patriots on the war, approved by the Soviets of the Moscow region with the support of the Bolsheviks. At the party’s National Conference, which begins in Petrograd on March 27, Stalin presents the report on the government. In his report, he argues that the interim government is consolidating the revolutionary achievements and therefore the task of the soviets is to “control” and push it forward. As a logical consequence, Stalin presents a motion for merging with the Mensheviks, which is passed by 14 votes to 13. It is understandable why, once the bureaucracy consolidates its power, Stalin will censure the minutes of this Conference (published only in the 1960s). The April Theses The April Theses are undoubtedly the most important text written in the frenetic months of the Russian revolution. It is a short text: 10 theses written on five or six pages, published in the Pravda on April 7 (20, according to our calendar). Let us reread it together. Thesis 1: Rejection of the “revolutionary defensism” line of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, which supports the continuity of the war. Thesis 2: The bourgeoisie robbed the power of the proletariat, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organization of the latter; it is necessary to reverse the situation by returning power to the proletariat supported by the poor peasants. It is not a task for an indeterminate future: it is “the duty of the present moment”. Thesis 3: No (even though critical) support for the Provisional Government. On the contrary, relentless exposure of its bourgeois nature. By reversing the policy hitherto pursued by Kamenev and Stalin, it should be pointed out that the government should not be supported under conditions, it should not be “critically stimulated” because it would only mean “sowing illusions” about the (impossible) fact that a bourgeois government could reconcile the interests of the two mortal class enemies, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This fundamental thesis deserves an observation: for Lenin, it is not a matter of obeying abstract criteria, a dogma. The fact is that supporting a bourgeois government in any way means creating obstacles to gain the proletariat’s consciousness of the need to “break” the bourgeois state machine, an inevitable step in forming a “workers’ government for the workers.” Thesis 4: Since the Bolsheviks are in “a small minority” in the soviets, as against the “opportunist elements”, it is necessary to patiently explain to the masses why they are following a wrong policy and why it is necessary to transfer “the entire state power to the Soviets.” Thesis 5: The objective is not a bourgeois parliamentary republic, but a republic of the Soviets, that is to say, the dissolution of the repressive forces, the replacement of the permanent army with the armament of the proletariat, the eligibility and revocability of all officials at any time. Thesis 6: Confiscation of all landed estates and nationalization of all lands under the control of the Soviets. Thesis 7: Union of all banks into a single national bank under the control of the Soviets. Thesis 8: To bring social production and distribution under the control of the Soviets. Thesis 9: Consistently with all this, it is necessary to immediately summon a congress and change the program and the party’s name to Communist Party . Thesis 10: The immediate creation of a new revolutionary International against the reformists and against the “Center” (Kautsky, Chkheidze, etc.). [9] Lenin dismisses the old program, summed up as the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” as “a formula that is already antiquated” and the person who speaks only of it “should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques.” However, Stalin will revive it in the course of the Soviets bureaucratic degeneration in the coming decades, but this is another story. [10] Trotsky’s Arrival: “The Best Bolshevik” On April 12, the Pravda publishes an article by Kamenev that criticizes the April Theses stressing that they are Lenin’s personal position, not the party’s. Kamenev adds that Lenin’s line is unacceptable since he proposes the immediate transformation of the revolution into a socialist one, something that for Kamenev (and not only for him) reminds much of Trotsky’s position that the Bolsheviks had fought. In the following days, Lenin began a hard fractional battle and managed to gain the support of an important part of the working class, that, on the other hand (as the Vyborg workers, the party’s backbone), had already expressed strong criticism of the Pravda ’s policy. However, that takes time: he is not immediately successful. In his first attempt, in a Petrograd Committee session, on April 12, the Theses were voted down by 13 votes to 2 and 1 abstention. A week later, at a conference in the Petrograd region, Lenin beats Kamenev by 20 votes to 6, and 9 abstentions. Finally, at the party’s 7 th Pan-Russian Conference (Petrograd, April 24-29), Lenin’s Theses won the majority. Nonetheless, a specific resolution on the theme of the socialist “character” of the revolution secures only 71 votes out of 118 [11] : The old “complete the democratic revolution first” thought still attaches a sector of the party. Consequently, this wing of the party (most notably Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin, while Stalin in the meantime aligns with the majority) thinks that the role of the Soviets is simply to “control” the power that should remain in the hands of the provisional government. On the question of the change of the party’s name, which he proposed to set the party more clearly from the Mensheviks, Lenin gets only his own vote. It is not a simple victory, therefore, and the fact that the provisional government was approaching a first deep crisis, facing street demonstrations, certainly helped him. Above all, as Trotsky observes, [12] Lenin’s victory over the party’s right wing recalls the fact that, in addition to the wrong programmatic formula of a “democratic dictatorship,” the Bolshevik party had been preparing for fifteen years to be at the head of the proletariat in the struggle for power. In those decisive months, its membership acted unconsciously looking for another perspective and, in practice, overcoming its own leadership. Lenin would illuminate them with the April Theses. Meanwhile, on May 4 (17 in the new calendar), Trotsky also arrives in Petrograd. He had spent the first few months of the year in New York after being expelled from Spain and France. A campaign by the Petrograd Soviet releases him from prison in the Amhrest military camp, Canada, where he stayed for one month, and prompts him to come back. In the first weeks after the outbreak of the revolution, he had written a great deal of articles (mostly published in the Russian-language journal Novy Mir ) where he resumed his theory of “permanent revolution” and developed it in concrete terms: Irreconcilable opposition to the provisional government as an indispensable premise to transfer all power to the Soviets and thus to develop the socialist revolution. Trotsky begins the collaboration with Lenin, just after his arrival. It will result in the merger of the Interdistrict group [13] with the Bolsheviks. While Lenin overcomes his “centrist” program of “democratic dictatorship,” Trotsky overcomes his “centrist” critiques of the Bolshevik-type party and abandons his unitary point of view. In fact, since 1914 he has been gradually shifting his position to conclude that “ it was necessary not only an ideological struggle against Menshevism (…) but also an organizational uncompromising rupture “. [14] Thus, the “permanent revolution” ceases to be considered (at least until the beginning of the Stalinization process, in 1924) Trotsky’s only idea but turns to be the practice and patrimony of Bolshevism and the successive Communist International (1919). Trotsky, in Lenin’s assertion, is “the best Bolshevik”. An Essential Lesson for Today What position would the world left have assumed, in the hundredth anniversary of the October revolution, if they had witnessed it? For us, the answer is quite simple: the major left would have supported the Provisional Government, delivering ministers to its cabinet; another part (which we have defined as “centrist”, i.e. semi-reformist) would have given “critical” support, breeding illusions on the possibility of pushing the government to the left by means of street actions. While only a small part of the world left (certainly the IWL-FI, and who else?) would act according to Lenin’s line in that telegram: no support for the government, no rapprochement with other left parties that support the government. Are we wrong? No, and the confirmation of this comes from the mere observation of what the whole left has done in the last decades but us. It is enough to observe the policy of the Italian Communist Refoundation party in this quarter of a century: support for the two-term imperialist Prodi governments with its own minister, or the support given by the entire reformist and semi-reformist left in recent years for the Greek “left-wing” bourgeois government of Tsipras as a model to be followed. The same as the PT’s administrations in Brazil, cited as an example of the ability to govern capitalism differently, reconciling the interests of the opposite classes. Are these not the proof that all this left, if they were present in the 1917 revolution, would have been on the opposite side of Lenin? In making this observation, we should add that when we speak of the Prodi, Lula-Dilma, and Tsipras governments, we are not talking about governments born out of a revolution and supported by the soviets, like those to whom – in any case – the Bolsheviks opposed in 1917! Therefore, we must conclude that present-day reformism stands on an even lower step than that Menshevik reformism which, according to Trotsky’s famous definition, had earned the right to end up in the trash bin of history. Thus, the April Theses continue, a century later, being a scandalous text for the reformists, while they celebrate October as a glorious event of the past, emptied of its teachings. These teachings, on the contrary, we must recover, so that the working class can move, with the struggles and the revolution, toward a new October. *** Translation: Marcos Margarido. ** Notes: [1] Trotsky, The Lessons of October , www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/ch4.htm [2] N. Soukhanov, Le Discours de Lénine du 3 Avril 1917 , published by Cahiers du Mouvement Ouvrier , n. 27, 2005, Editor J.J. Marie. Our translation.

[3] Lenin, Telegram to the Bolsheviks Leaving for Russia , www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/mar/06.htm .

[4] To learn more of the Letters From Afar and the Paris Commune, read our recent article published on the IWL-FI website: 1871-1917: Por que os bolcheviques estudaram a Comuna de Paris para fazer a Revolução de Outubro [5] We presented this debate in a more detailed fashion in What is the theory of permanent revolution?, published in Trotskismo Oggi, n. 1, September 2011. [6] Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. I, p. 347. [7] There are a number of studies, as by Michael Löwy, including “From Hegel’s Great Logic to Petrograd’s Finland Station” in Dialectique et Révolution (Anthropos, 1973), or the more recent and interesting one (although we do not share some of its conclusions) by Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel & Western Marxism: A Critical Study (University of Illinois Press, 1995). [8] V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, in Collected Works, Volume 38. [9] V. I. Lenin, April Theses, in Collected Works, Volume 24 – www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm [10] The expressions in quotation marks in this sentence are from Lenin, Letters on Tactics (Collected Works, Volume 24). [11] For a detailed analysis of the vote at the April Conference, see Marcel Liebman, La révolution russe (Marabout Université, 1967) or Jean Jacques Marie, Lenin (Balland, 2004). [12] Read Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, especially the chapters: “The Bolsheviks and Lenin” and “The rearming of the party,” for an overview of the question of the April Theses and the struggle in the party. [13] The Interdistrict Group or Mezhraionka, an organization of about 4,000-5,000 militants, was more like a coordination of ex-Mensheviks and ex-Bolsheviks. Ioffe, Lunacharsky, Antonov-Ovseenko, Urickij were members. To read more, see Ian D. Thatcher, The St. Petersburg / Petrograd Mezhraionka, 1913-1917: The Rise and Fall of a Movement for Social-Democratic Unity in Slavonic & East European Review, 87, 2009. [14] On this, see Leon Trotsky, “The Rearming of the Party,” in History of the Russian Revolution.

Check out our other content

S. african elections: ruling anc fears decline in support, icc inches forward on gaza but reveals shortcomings, declaration for the european elections 2024: a socialist and revolutionary way out of the europe of capital, solidarity with ilan pappé, “forbes” list of multimillionaires: a deplorable example of how the vultures get fat from capitalist barbarism, down with french colonialism in kanaky.

Check out other tags:

Most Popular Articles

United states: workers march for palestine in the bay area, following the example of the environmental struggle in panama.

• The Student Experience
• Financial Aid
• Degree Finder
• Undergraduate Arts & Sciences
• Departments and Programs
• Research, Scholarship & Creativity
• Centers & Institutes
• Geisel School of Medicine
• Guarini School of Graduate & Advanced Studies
• Thayer School of Engineering
• Tuck School of Business

Campus Life

• Diversity & Inclusion
• Athletics & Recreation
• Student Groups & Activities
• Residential Life

Comparative Literature Program

• [email protected] Contact & Department Info Mail
• Undergraduate
• Learning Objectives
• Courses Recommended For First Year Students
• Course Descriptions
• How to Apply
• Minor in Translation Studies
• Thesis Timeline
• Past Theses
• Awards & Prizes
• Undergraduate Alumni Stories
• Tell Us Your Story
• About the Program
• Degree Requirements
• Graduate Alumni Stories
• Academic Achievement Award
• COLT MA Graduate Handbook
• News & Events
• Annual Hoffman Lecture
• Annual Zantop Memorial Lecture

Search form

Charisse burden-stelly speaks at 20th annual zantop memorial lecture.

On April 25, the comparative literature program hosted Wayne State University African American studies professor Charisse Burden-Stelly for the 20th annual Zantop Memorial Lecture in Carson Hall. Burden-Stelly spoke about her book, "Black Scare/ Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States," which described the panic surrounding Black equality and communism during the 20th century. 

According to Daniel Keane GR'24, the Zantop lecture is held in honor of German language and comparative literature professor Susanne Zantop — who was murdered , along with her husband, Earth sciences professor Half Zantop, in 2001. 

"Each year, the Zantop lecture is a bittersweet occasion, for it gives us the opportunity to both mourn the tragic and untimely loss in 2001 of two beloved Dartmouth professors and members of the Upper Valley community and … honor their memory through an intellectual communal gathering of students, faculty, staff and Upper Valley residents alike," Keane said. 

According to Keane, the comparative literature masters cohort — which he is currently a part of — chooses the lecture speaker each year. Keane said the current group chose Burden-Stelly, a member of the political organization Black Alliance for Peace, because she conducts "objective scholarship" on the history of anti-Black oppression and anti-communism in the United States. 

"[Burden-Stelly's] research questions come out of political work, and I think that's how all intellectual work should function," Keane said. "It should be rooted in political work that's for one's community." 

For the full article: The Dartmouth

• The Student Experience
• Financial Aid
• Degree Finder
• Undergraduate Arts & Sciences
• Departments and Programs
• Research, Scholarship & Creativity
• Centers & Institutes
• Geisel School of Medicine
• Guarini School of Graduate & Advanced Studies
• Thayer School of Engineering
• Tuck School of Business

Campus Life

• Diversity & Inclusion
• Athletics & Recreation
• Student Groups & Activities
• Residential Life

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

• [email protected] Contact & Department Info Mail
• Application Process
• Essay Guidelines
• Application Policies
• Enrollment Options
• Financial Aid Questions
• Student Life
• When You Arrive On Campus
• Summer Symposium
• Ethics Requirement
• Requirements by Concentration
• Creative Writing
• Cultural Studies Program
• Globalization Studies
• Course Descriptions
• Course Schedules by Term
• How to Enroll in Courses
• Proposal Guidelines
• Thesis Proposal
• Thesis Grants
• Thesis Research
• Submitting Your Thesis
• Sample Thesis Abstracts
• The Byam Shaw-Brownstone Thesis Excellence Award
• Student Experience
• Click here to order your Dartmouth transcript
• Academic Transcripts
• Student FORMS
• News & Events
• MALS Calendar
• Clamantis: The MALS Journal
• Please click here to watch the Clamantis video message
• Alumni Update
• Student Profiles

Search form

Hiv and advocacy 4 person panel by dartmouth's dickey center, professor lucey's linkedin, check out mals course 373, see dr. lucey's 40 reflections, professor lucey's wikipedia page, dr. daniel lucey '77 med '81/82 awarded the 2024 lester b. granger '18 award, posted on april 02, 2024 by mals program, amanda watson.

MALS own, Dr. Daniel Lucey '77 MED '81/82 has been chosen by the Division of Institutional Diversity and Equity at Dartmouth to recieve the 2024 Lester B. Granger '18 Award.

Dr. Lucey teaches MALS Course 373 Epidemics: Vortex of Fear and Wisdom and we are so excited that the college has chosen to honor him.

"The Lester B. Granger '18 Award is presented annually to a Dartmouth College graduate or graduates whose lifelong commitment to public service has been exemplary. Granger Award recipients have exhibited leadership and innovation in meeting community needs and benefiting an underserved population" 

"The award honors your extraordinary  work and dedication as an international infectious disease specialist focusing on the intersection of infectious diseases and historically marginalized populations. It also recognizes your tireless work calling on governments and international bodies to do more and be better prepared in the face of global health epidemics." 

Read the annoucement article here ! 

Please join us in congratulating Professor Lucey! 

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

FAS receives gift to bolster arts, humanities, and strengthen financial aid

Dean’s legacy honored

Tested most by game he didn’t play

Shruthi Kumar, Robert Clinton, and Blake Alexander Lopez.

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer; Dylan Goodman; and Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Bridging social distance, embracing uncertainty, fighting for equity

Harvard Staff Writer

Student Commencement speeches to tap into themes faced by Class of 2024

Part of the commencement 2024 series.

A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.

Three graduating students selected in a University-wide competition will deliver speeches Thursday at Tercentenary Theatre as part of the one of the oldest traditions of Commencement.

The student orators are Blake Alexander Lopez, a senior from the College who will deliver the Latin Salutatory; Shruthi Kumar, also a College senior, who will deliver the Senior English Address; and Robert Clinton, J.D. ’24, a Harvard Law School graduate who will deliver the Graduate English Address.

Overcoming those 6 feet of separation

Blake Alexander Lopez Undergraduate Latin  

When Lopez arrived on campus in the fall of 2020, six months into the COVID pandemic, first-year students could live in dorms, but they had to attend classes online and keep social distance as part of public health guidelines to slow the spread of the virus.

A joint classical languages and literature and linguistics concentrator with a secondary field in medieval studies, Lopez will address “that sort of nearer distance that we found ourselves within” in the Latin oration he will deliver during the Morning Exercises of Commencement.

“Being a student on campus in the fall of 2020 felt like we were in the proximity of all these things we had so long dreamed about, and yet there was an inherent separation between us,” said Lopez, a Kirkland House resident. “We were physically rather close, living in rooms next to each other and seeing each other on our computer screens because we had to stay socially distant.”

But as the pandemic eased its grip, members of the Class of 2024 returned to normal life and built closer relationships with one another. Celebrating graduation in person and together is a reason to celebrate, said Lopez.

“What I would like the audience to take away from my speech is that whatever difficulties were posed to us, we were able to meet them, adapt and exhibit a resilience that allowed us to thrive,” said Lopez. “There is so much our class has to be proud of, in view of what we faced. It is because what we faced, we faced together.”

Lopez, who fell in love with Latin in high school, said the language will serve him well to talk about both separation and closeness. Latin is considered a dead language because there are no native speakers. During his speech, subtitles will appear on screens in the Yard, and an English translation will be included in the program flyer.

“There’s a layer of separation between the reader of the speech’s English translation and myself delivering it in Latin,” said Lopez, who grew up in Chicago. “But being able to communicate my ideas and the feelings behind them across the linguistic boundary is reflective in a lot of ways of the fact that in spite of the barriers separating the Class of 2024 when we first arrived on campus, we were able to traverse that distance.”

At Harvard, Lopez strengthened his love of Latin and the classics. His senior thesis focused in part on ancient graffiti inscriptions found in Pompeii, which include jokes, riddles, literary quotations, and the customary “I was here.” The subject fascinates him because it provides a glimpse into the intimate relationship between Latin and the way common people made use of it.

After graduation, Lopez will pursue a master’s degree in classics at Oxford University. For now, he cherishes the fact that he was able to realize the dream he started nurturing when he was applying to Harvard.

“The fact that hundreds of years going on, we still do a Latin oration at Commencement really captivated me,” said Lopez. “I would sort of daydream about it. I’d like to go back to 17-year-old me and tell him, ‘Hey, we did it.’ Or as they’d say in Latin, ‘Vicimus.’ ”

The power of not knowing

Shruthi Kumar Undergraduate English

Kumar’s speech explores a subject she knows all too well.

Coming to Harvard as a pre-med student, Kumar took a history of science class on health disparities in the U.S., and she had a change of heart.

By embracing uncertainty, she found her passion for public health. “I didn’t know something like history of science existed,” said Kumar, a joint history of science and economics concentrator with a secondary in human evolutionary biology. “But I fell in love with that class, and I realized that history of science was what I really wanted to study to find ways to address the world’s biggest health problems.”

A Mather House resident, Kumar is glad she took risks during her time at Harvard and challenged societal and parental expectations when she switched pre-med studies for classes on health inequities and public health issues. In hindsight, Kumar said her decision made sense. After all, she had been interested in public health since high school, when she was involved in a mental health education program for youth.

In College, Kumar started a campaign to ensure that all Harvard bathrooms supply free menstrual products. Thanks to her advocacy, 817 bathrooms across the University are fully stocked with free tampons and sanitary pads on a regular basis.

Navigating the uncertainty of choosing a new career concentration could be nerve-racking, but Kumar found strength when she decided to follow her inner voice. “You’re supposed to make money, you’re supposed to have a family, you’re supposed to do this, that, or the other,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I think we owe it to ourselves to listen to that voice inside that tells us, ‘Oh, this is what I’m passionate about.’”

Kumar is confident her message will resonate with the Class of 2024, which started their first year amid the uncertainty of the pandemic. “There is a lot you don’t know in your first year, and on top of that, there was COVID,” said Kumar, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. “Our class had to grapple with not knowing what was going to happen in the next few years of our College experience. … We have gone through College with this chaos, and we have developed a strength to deal with uncertainty, and that’s what makes us powerful.”

The power of not knowing can be revelatory, said Kumar. After graduation, she will work on public health entrepreneurship and after that, she plans to attend law school or pursue a Ph.D.

“We are all people walking through the world, not really knowing what’s going to happen,” Kumar said. “But the power of not knowing is about how you can turn that space of fear and anxiety into something that is empowering, uplifting, and exciting. It’s a conscious shift that you must make pretty much all the time every day.”

‘Working hard’ vs. ‘doing good’

Robert Clinton Graduate English

Growing up in Richmond, California, in an African American middle-class family, Clinton felt the call to public service early on. He is not sure where it came from, but he believes that both being the child of civil servants and being Black in the U.S. may have contributed to his commitment to the common good.

In his Commencement speech, Clinton will urge students to use their privilege and power to better the lives of fellow citizens and create a more equitable society. Privilege comes with social responsibility, he said.

“Some people who graduate from Harvard are going to be presidents or senators, but most people are going to be managers, professors, and even if they are not at the very top, they will still have a lot of power,” said Clinton. “We will be people with good jobs because we went to Harvard. And that means that we must be on the lookout for opportunities to help people.”

Harvard graduates should put their education to good use, said Clinton, who found inspiration in the work of actor and activist Harry Belafonte, who used his fame to support the Civil Rights struggle. Clinton was also stirred by the words of a Law School professor who exhorted students to find something bigger than themselves and be part of it.

“There’s a difference between working hard and doing good,”he said. “People here know how to work really hard, but working hard doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re making the world better or doing your part.”

Before coming to the Law School, Clinton worked for the city of San Francisco in the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs. But he began thinking seriously about the law when he became involved with efforts to remove a citizenship question from the 2020 U.S. Census questionnaire. A coalition of immigrant groups challenged former President Donald Trump’s administration before the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the petitioners.

“I got to see how lawyers can use the law to help people and to hold people accountable,” Clinton said. “It was really inspiring.”

After graduation, Clinton will clerk for Judge Dale Ho of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. By coincidence, Ho was the lawyer representing the immigrant groups that challenged Trump’s plan to include the citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Clinton is elated over that twist of fate.

“It was the first legal case that I followed from beginning to end,” said Clinton. “I read the briefs even though I didn’t know what they meant, I listened to the oral argument, and I was shocked when against all the odds, they won the case.

“And it just so happens that Judge Ho is going to be my first boss after law school. I joked with him in the interview that he was one of the reasons why I went to Law School. It feels like a wonderful full-circle moment.”

Also in this series:

‘Shed the tears … get up and fight some more’

Justice Sonia Sotomayor on importance of civic engagement, youth involvement, giving back

Day to remember

One journey behind them, grads pause to reflect before starting the next

Choose bravely, Ressa tells Harvard grads

Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist puts values first in Commencement address focused on threats to democracy

‘Be that voice for compassion, learning, understanding, and unity’

Burns and others deliver call to action – and empathy – at Class Day ceremonies

Six receive honorary degrees

Harvard recognizes educator, conductor, theoretical physicist, advocate for elderly, writer, and Nobel laureate

A joyful noise

Ringing of bells marks 373rd Commencement

Ready to serve

New officers ‘join a long crimson line that goes back to the very founding of this country.’

Harvard awards 9,262 degrees

Totals reflect the 2023-24 academic year

Time to stand up, defend American higher education, Faust says

President emerita invokes spirit of Emerson, pushes back against recent criticisms

Maria Ressa will speak her troubled mind

‘Democracy dies quickly,’ warns Nobel laureate ahead of Commencement, where she hopes to find students committed to protecting it

‘Seek inspiration in one another’

Garber praises graduates’ resilience, urges them to maintain and cherish lasting bonds

‘I haven’t really had a proper weekend in a long time’

Longtime supporter of grads Kathy Hanley caps 13-year quest with a Commencement of her own

Share this article

You might like.

Business leader Joseph Y. Bae ’94 and novelist Janice Y. K. Lee ’94 expand upon three decades of supporting academic excellence, opportunity at Harvard

Hoekstra, Faust, colleagues laud Robin Kelsey, who will step down from his arts and humanities deanship

Portrait honors Harvard’s first Black lacrosse player, whose 1941 benching in the South sparked outcry

When should Harvard speak out?

Institutional Voice Working Group provides a roadmap in new report

• Graduate College

Contact the NAU Office of Graduate & Professional Studies

NAU Office of Graduate & Professional Studies admission deadlines

• International students must apply on or before March 1st for fall admission, if an earlier deadline is not stipulated below.
• The deadlines listed below are subject to change, but are reviewed and updated regularly. For the most accurate deadline information, please check the NAU Office of Graduate & Professional Studies Admissions Application for the specific program.
• For full consideration of available funding (GA, tuition waivers, or scholarships) it is best to apply to the program early. Contact the program for specific funding deadlines.

Definitions:

Priority-   If a priority deadline has been specified, it is highly recommended that you submit your application on or before this date. Students that meet this deadline may be given special consideration for things such as assistantships, scholarships, fellowships, etc., if available. Rolling admission- no specific deadline has been identified. Students can apply for admission up until the start of any given term or session. Space available basis- applications will be accepted and considered if space is available in the program. Final- applications will not be accepted past this date. Admission not available- admission applications are not accepted for the specific term.

Graduate program application deadlines

Office of graduate & professional studies, mailing address, social media.

Help build the RCP!

Pledge a day's wage read: why have we launched this appeal.

Pledge a day’s wage per month or a one-time amount to help build the RCP

Pledge a day’s wage per month or a one-time amount to help build the RCP. Monthly donors receive a print subscription to Communist Revolution .

Lenin’s April Theses

V.I. Lenin, Introduction by Alex Grant | April 3, 2017

Lenin delivered his famous April Theses at the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on April 4th, 1917. It is not an overestimation to say that this speech was a bombshell for those present. “Has Lenin gone mad? Has Lenin become a Trotskyist?” were some of the sentiments. Prior to Lenin’s arrival in Russia, Kamenev and Stalin were directing the policy of the Bolsheviks towards critical support for the “Provisional Government” and fusion with the Mensheviks who had the same policy. The liberal bourgeois of the Provisional Government had declared themselves the power with no democratic mandate, despite the fact it was the workers and soldiers of the soviets who did all the fighting and dying to overthrow the Tsar in the February Revolution.

Lenin explained that the only reason that the workers failed to take the power in February was that they were not class conscious enough. He went on to explain that as a capitalist government, the Provisional Government could only wage an imperialist war and could not bring peace. Being tied to the bankers and landowners, it could not provide land to the peasants. The capitalists could not solve the crisis in society and bring bread to the workers, or any form of constituent democracy. Only a soviet workers’ government, leading the poor peasantry, could solve these problems. In essence, Lenin had come over to Trotsky’s analysis of the permanent revolution – and in New York, independently of Lenin, Trotsky was advancing equivalent slogans.

Lenin’s April Theses shows us the vital importance of ideas in the revolutionary struggle. Some ask why Marxists spend so much time studying, discussing, and debating ideas. Wouldn’t it be better to just put such abstract issues aside and get on with practical work, they say. The reality is that when things really matter, so-called “abstract” ideas make all the difference between victory and defeat, revolution and reaction. Support for the capitalist Provisional Government would have led to the Bolsheviks defending the war, the failure of land reform, and the perpetual postponement of universal suffrage. It would have led to the wrecking of the revolution and the likely victory of a Russian form of fascism (ie. Kornilov). If the Russian Revolution is the greatest event in human history, then the April Theses are the great idea that made it possible.

Introduction

I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3, and therefore at the meeting on April 4, I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation.

The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself—and for honest opponents—was to prepare the theses in writing. I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tsereteli . I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks .

I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report.

1) In our attitude towards the war , which under the new [provisional] government of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible.

The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.

In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.

The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front.

Fraternisation.

2) The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.

This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.

This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.

3) No support for the Provisional Government ; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.

4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee ( Chkheidze , Tsereteli , etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.

5) 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.

Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. [1]

The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.

6) The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.

Confiscation of all landed estates.

Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatines , according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.

7) The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

8) It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.

9) Party tasks:

(a) Immediate convocation of a Party congress;

(b) Alteration of the Party Programme, mainly:

(1) On the question of imperialism and the imperialist war,

(2) On our attitude towards the state and our demand for a “commune state” [2] ;

(3) Amendment of our out-of-date minimum programme;

(c) Change of the Party’s name. [3]

10. A new International.

We must take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the “Centre”. [4]

In order that the reader may understand why I had especially to emphasise as a rare exception the “case” of honest opponents, I invite him to compare the above theses with the following objection by Mr. Goldenberg: Lenin, he said, “has planted the banner of civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy” (quoted in No. 5 of Mr. Plekhanov ’s Yedinstvo ).

Isn’t it a gem?

I write, announce and elaborately explain: “In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism … in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them….”

Yet the bourgeois gentlemen who call themselves Social-Democrats, who do not belong either to the broad sections or to the mass believers in defencism, with serene brow present my views thus: “The banner[!] of civil war” (of which there is not a word in the theses and not a word in my speech!) has been planted(!) “in the midst [!!] of revolutionary democracy…”.

What does this mean? In what way does this differ from riot-inciting agitation, from Russkaya Volya ?

I write, announce and elaborately explain: “The Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and therefore our task is to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.”

Yet opponents of a certain brand present my views as a call to “civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy”!

I attacked the Provisional Government for not having appointed an early date or any date at all, for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly , and for confining itself to promises. I argued that without the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies the convocation of the Constituent Assembly is not guaranteed and its success is impossible.

And the view is attributed to me that I am opposed to the speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly!

I would call this “raving”, had not decades of political struggle taught me to regard honesty in opponents as a rare exception.

Mr. Plekhanov in his paper called my speech “raving”. Very good, Mr. Plekhanov! But look how awkward, uncouth and slow-witted you are in your polemics. If I delivered a raving speech for two hours, how is it that an audience of hundreds tolerated this “raving”? Further, why does your paper devote a whole column to an account of the “raving”? Inconsistent, highly inconsistent!

It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain, to recall what Marx and Engels said in 1871, 1872 and 1875 about the experience of the Paris Commune and about the kind of state the proletariat needs. [See: The Civil War in France and Critique of the Gotha Programme ]

Ex-Marxist Mr. Plekhanov evidently does not care to recall Marxism.

I quoted the words of Rosa Luxemburg , who on August 4, 1914 , called German Social-Democracy a “stinking corpse”. And the Plekhanovs, Goldenbergs and Co. feel “offended”. On whose behalf? On behalf of the German chauvinists, because they were called chauvinists!

They have got themselves in a mess, these poor Russian social-chauvinists—socialists in word and chauvinists in deed.

[1] i.e. the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people.—Lenin

[2] i.e., a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype.—Lenin

[3] Instead of “Social-Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the “defencists” and the vacillating “Kautskyites”), we must call ourselves the Communist Party.—Lenin

[4] The “ Centre ” in the international Social-Democratic movement is the trend which vacillates between the chauvinists (=“defencists”) and internationalists, i.e., Kautsky and Co. in Germany, Longuet and Co. in France, Chkheidze and Co. in Russia, Turati and Co. in Italy, MacDonald and Co. in Britain, etc.—Lenin

The April Theses (The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution)

• Soviet Power

This article contains Lenin’s famous April Theses, read by him at two meetings of the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, on April 4, 1917. Published April 7, 1917 in Pravda No. 26.  Signed: N. Lenin.

I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3, and therefore at the meeting on April 4, I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation.

The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself—and for honest opponents—was to prepare the theses in writing . I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tsereteli . I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks .

I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report.

1) In our attitude towards the war , which under the new [provisional] government of Lvov and Co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to “revolutionary defencism” is permissible.

The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.

In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.

The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front.

Fraternisation.

2) The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage , which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.

This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.

This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.

3) No support for the Provisional Government ; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding “demand” that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.

4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee ( Chkheidze , Tsereteli , etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.

5) 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.

Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy.

The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.

6) The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.

Confiscation of all landed estates.

Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatines , according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.

7) The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

8) It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.

9) Party tasks:

(a) Immediate convocation of a Party congress;

(b) Alteration of the Party Programme, mainly:

(1) On the question of imperialism and the imperialist war,

(2) On our attitude towards the state and our demand for a “commune state”;

(3) Amendment of our out-of-date minimum programme;

(c) Change of the Party’s name.

10. A new International.

We must take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the “Centre”.

In order that the reader may understand why I had especially to emphasise as a rare exception the “case” of honest opponents, I invite him to compare the above theses with the following objection by Mr. Goldenberg: Lenin, he said, “has planted the banner of civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy” (quoted in No. 5 of Mr. Plekhanov ’s Yedinstvo ).

Isn’t it a gem?

I write, announce and elaborately explain: “In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism ... in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them....”

Yet the bourgeois gentlemen who call themselves Social-Democrats, who do not belong either to the broad sections or to the mass believers in defencism, with serene brow present my views thus: “The banner[!] of civil war” (of which there is not a word in the theses and not a word in my speech!) has been planted(!) “in the midst [!!] of revolutionary democracy...”.

What does this mean? In what way does this differ from riot-inciting agitation, from Russkaya Volya ?

I write, announce and elaborately explain: “The Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and therefore our task is to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.”

Yet opponents of a certain brand present my views as a call to “civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy”!

I attacked the Provisional Government for not having appointed an early date or any date at all, for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly , and for confining itself to promises. I argued that without the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies the convocation of the Constituent Assembly is not guaranteed and its success is impossible.

And the view is attributed to me that I am opposed to the speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly!

I would call this “raving”, had not decades of political struggle taught me to regard honesty in opponents as a rare exception.

Mr. Plekhanov in his paper called my speech “raving”. Very good, Mr. Plekhanov! But look how awkward, uncouth and slow-witted you are in your polemics. If I delivered a raving speech for two hours, how is it that an audience of hundreds tolerated this “raving”? Further, why does your paper devote a whole column to an account of the “raving”? Inconsistent, highly inconsistent!

It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain, to recall what Marx and Engels said in 1871, 1872 and 1875 about the experience of the Paris Commune and about the kind of state the proletariat needs. [See: The Civil War in France and Critique of the Gotha Programme ]

Ex-Marxist Mr. Plekhanov evidently does not care to recall Marxism.

I quoted the words of Rosa Luxemburg , who on August 4, 1914 , called German Social-Democracy a “stinking corpse”. And the Plekhanovs, Goldenbergs and Co. feel “offended”. On whose behalf? On behalf of the German chauvinists, because they were called chauvinists!

They have got themselves in a mess, these poor Russian social-chauvinists—socialists in word and chauvinists in deed.

Source: Marxist Internet Archive