Chapter 3

The “Great War,” 1917, and Beyond

ARGUABLY THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL WORK OF ANY of the four Russian Social Democratic Labor Party Duma fractions came with the onset of the First World War. The antiwar actions of the five Bolshevik deputies in the Fourth Duma were for Lenin a model for what he would begin to call communist parliamentary work. But after they were arrested and exiled to Siberia, that work ceased to occupy his attention to the degree it once had. The reason is that with the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917, Lenin would have to spend much of his time before and after the October Revolution defending soviet governance, for him a superior form of representative democracy. By no means did this signify a change of heart about the parliamentary arena. To the contrary, he maintained to the end that in the absence of soviets communists should make use of parliaments but based on the lessons drawn and codified by the new Communist or Third International. Subsequent history revealed, however, that only a few who claimed to do politics in his name were faithful to the legacy he bequeathed.

The Duma Fraction and Antiwar Work

When Nicholas II declared war on Germany on July 19, 1914 (or August 2 in the new calendar)—in response to the German Kaiser’s declaration a day earlier—the only question for the Duma was what would be the response of the social democratic deputies.1 Would they get on board the war train as had every other fraction, including the Cadets? They had long opposed the Czar’s imperial ambitions and the chauvinist campaigns that enabled them, and as an affiliate of the Socialist International, the RSDLP had signed on to the much publicized Basle Manifesto of 1912 when the Balkan Wars commenced. That proclamation, standing on the shoulders of the antiwar resolution of the 1907 Stuttgart Congress, called on its signers to oppose militarism. If war began, their parliamentary fractions should vote against any funding and call on the proletariat in their respective countries to turn it into a civil war against their own bourgeoisies.

The Historic “Betrayal” and the Bolshevik Response

To the disbelief of every Russian social democrat, regardless of faction, the Reichstag fraction of the German party voted on August 4 to fund the war. The fateful action of the flagship party of international social democracy gave license to every other social democratic parliamentary group in Western Europe to follow suit. The Menshevik (and soon to be Bolshevik) Alexandra Kollontai was present when the vote was taken: “‘I could not believe it,’ she wrote in her diary that evening: ‘I was convinced that either they had all gone mad, or else I had lost my mind.’”2 Lenin, too, was apparently taken aback, despite having recently written about the creeping “disease” within the German movement. His reaction to the vote, “a feeling of the most bitter disappointment,” suggests as much: “The responsibility for thus disgracing socialism falls primarily on the German Social-Democrats.”3 This wholesale “betrayal,” as he and many other social democrats called it, of the basic principles of Marxism was soon recognized as a watershed in the history of the movement. For Lenin it was a teaching moment, as he explained to Kollantai at the end of the year: “The European war has brought this great benefit to international socialism, that it has exposed for all to see the utter rottenness, baseness and meanness of opportunism, thereby giving a splendid impetus to the cleansing of the working-class movement from the dung accumulated during decades of peace.”4

How the Russian parliamentary group, both wings, would respond to the war drums now took on added significance in the aftermath of the vote of the German and other Western European parties. With the other Bolshevik fraction members out of town during the Duma’s summer recess, it fell to Badayev to answer the deluge of questions from reporters working for St. Petersburg’s bourgeois and monarchist press. “But what I said was altogether unsuitable for publication in their newspapers. I declared”:

The working class will oppose the war with all its force. The war is against the interests of workers. On the contrary, its edge is turned against the working class all over the world. The Basle Congress . . . in the name of the world proletariat, passed a resolution declaring that, in case of the declaration of war, our duty was to wage a determined struggle against it. We, the real representatives of the working class, will fight for the slogan “War against War.” Every member of our fraction will fight against the war with all the means at his disposal.5

If the prowar press ignored Badayev’s message, the regime’s police certainly did not. The two last sentences meant that from then on he and his other comrades would be under even closer surveillance.

In preparation for the reconvening of the Duma to vote on funding for the war, the Bolshevik, Menshevik-liquidator, and Trudovik deputies held discussions to see if they could come up with a joint declaration. After a number of meetings a statement was agreed on by only the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Though read at the session on July 26, Badayev reports that the Octobrist Duma president “censored it before it was printed in the stenographic report.”6 Regarding its contents, “Although our declaration did not contain a clear and precise characterization of the war or of the position of the working class and did not give a well-defined revolutionary lead, yet, when set off against the jingo background, it sounded a clear call of protest against the war madness.” Badayev suggests that a joint statement with the Mensheviks required a watering down of the Bolsheviks’ antiwar stance due in part to the patriotic fervor of the moment.7 Nevertheless, the declaration and what the social democrats then did stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the Duma deliberations: “After its patriotic orgy, the State Duma proceeded to vote for the war budget. In accordance with decisions taken at all congresses of the International, our fraction refused to take part in the voting and left the hall. Our declaration and our refusal to vote war credits raised a storm of protest from the Duma majority. Deputies from all other parties, including the left Cadets and Progressives, lost their temper and attacked us in the lobbies.” The walk out of all social democrats (Trudoviks as well according to other reports) was an instant cause célèbre and “soon became widely known among the workers.” It initiated the Bolshevik’s antiwar work, “which, under war conditions, rendered every member who was caught liable to trial by court-martial and almost certain death.” Their Duma group would have to lead this campaign, because in the wake of the wholesale crackdown by the regime on the underground when the war began, it was the only Bolshevik unit that had some room to maneuver.

In consultation with what was left of the Central Committee based now in Finland, the Bolshevik fraction issued a number of antiwar proclamations: “[One] dealt with the necessity of conducting propaganda among the troops, with preparing for an armed struggle, and with the approaching revolution. Thus, the slogan of ‘War against war’ was evolving into a practical program of utilizing the war for the revolutionary struggle.” The collaboration between the Bolshevik centers in St. Petersburg and Finland entailed a new and increasingly dangerous game of cat and mouse in court-martial-ruled Russia. The police assumed, rightly, that for the Bolsheviks to be able to produce and distribute their antiwar propaganda meant that the Duma deputies had to be intimately involved and that Badayev was probably the chief culprit. As one of their reports explained, “[T]hough ‘the St. Petersburg Committee has ceased its activity . . . the restless youthful members of the illegal organizations are not content with their enforced inactivity and, under the influence of the Social-Democratic deputy, Badayev, have begun to issue a series of leaflets dealing with current events with the set purpose of discrediting the government’s conduct of the war . . . All measures will be taken to obtain from persons arrested confessions which will prove that the deputy Badayev is engaged in revolutionary propaganda.’”8 Again, the parliamentary immunity the deputies enjoyed—increasingly tenuous—allowed them to travel widely to do antiwar work and in the process rebuild the shattered party.

In contrast to the Bolsheviks, Western European social democrats embraced the war in the name of defending the homeland. The head of the Socialist International, Emile Vandervelde—the same individual who had only a month earlier at the Paris meeting directed the Bolsheviks to dissolve their faction, now a newly minted and proud cabinet member in Belgium’s prowar government—sent a letter to the two Russian Duma fractions urging them to support the war and in effect end their antiwar stance. Not surprisingly, his appeal had no credibility with the Bolshevik deputies. It was a different story for the six Mensheviks. In his letter, Vandervelde asked the Russians to “share the common standpoint of socialist democracy in Europe.” His appeal gave political cover to those Mensheviks who were looking for an opportunity to reject the position they took on July 26. After a heated debate they all did just that.9 The five Bolsheviks were now the sole antiwar Duma fraction.

While social democratic deputies were making their stance in the Duma on July 26, Lenin, who was living in Austrian-controlled Poland—now a belligerent of Russia—was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks. Only after he and Krupskaya relocated in Switzerland was he able to reconnect with the fraction after an almost two-month hiatus. In the meantime, as well as drafting positions the Bolsheviks should take on the war, he gave public talks. In one instance a newspaper reported on his intervention at a talk that Plekhanov gave on the war in Lausanne: “Comrade Lenin . . . analyzed the duty of socialists in wartime. Social-Democrats did their duty only when they fought chauvinist passions at home. And the Serbian Social-Democrats offered the best example of such fulfilment of duty.” The Serbian social democrats were the first to have opposed the war and voted against war credits.

That the Serbians offered “the best example” of a response is significant. The joint statement Badayev and the other four Bolshevik deputies entered into with the Mensheviks on July 26 came with a political price that Lenin no doubt disagreed with, especially the provision that was greeted with broad applause when read in the nearly unanimous prowar Duma: “The proletariat, which is the constant defender of the freedom and interests of the people, will at all times defend the cultural wealth of the nation against any attack from whatever quarter.”10 For Lenin, this smacked of Western European social democracy’s “defending the homeland” excuse for supporting the war. Thus his proposal on October 17 to the Central Committee member, based in Stockholm, who was in direct contact with the fraction: “[O]ur group should make a statement independent of the bloc, and should set forth a consistent point of view.”11 The declaration of “the bloc,” as Badayev later admitted, “did not contain a clear and precise characterization of the war or of the position of the working class and did not give a well-defined revolutionary lead.” In contrast to the July 26 declaration, the Bolshevik deputies’ rejection of Vandervelde’s entreaties to get on board the war train, a response that was published in Sotsial-Demokrat, appears to have had input from Lenin.12

Lenin’s Theses on the War

About a month after the war began, Lenin formulated a set of theses, positions the Bolsheviks should take, and submitted them for discussion and debate. A major factor in the “betrayal of socialism” by the Western European social democratic parties was due to their “making a fetish of the necessary utilization of bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois legality, and forgetting that illegal forms of organization and agitation are imperative at times of crises.”13 Nothing in the remaining theses was really new, and they were consistent with what Badayev told the press in the now renamed Petrograd (“St. Petersburg” sounded too German for the regime’s chauvinist campaign) except for the sentence in the sixth thesis: “From the viewpoint of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its army, which oppress Poland, the Ukraine, and many other peoples of Russia, and foment hatred among the peoples so as to increase Great-Russian oppression of the other nationalities, and consolidate the reactionary and barbarous government of the tsar’s monarchy, would be the lesser evil by far.”14 That the Bolsheviks should welcome a defeat of the Czar’s armies was a position that many of Lenin’s comrades, especially those in Russia, found difficult to embrace. It was not the easiest stance, “revolutionary defeatism,” as it came to be known—in contrast to the “defensist” position of most social democrats—to take in the midst of the patriotic fervor sweeping the country in the early days of the war.15 Both the regime and opponents like the Cadets seized on the sentence to try to discredit the Bolsheviks and isolate them politically.

A close reading of Lenin’s controversial thesis suggests that it was informed by his understanding of the national question and proletarian internationalism—the dialectic between the two. It was consistent, he argued, with “the fundamental truth of socialism, long ago set forth in the Communist Manifesto, that the workingmen have no country.” The working class of the oppressor nation had to bend over backward to prove its proletarian internationalism, especially in time of war. Lenin assumed that the oppressed nations in the Romanov’s oft-called “prison house of nations” would have the least problem with “revolutionary defeatism.” A victory for the monarchy would only strengthen its ability to suppress them. And winning the oppressed nations was crucial in the formation of a revolutionary majority. This interpretation of Lenin’s position is given added credence by the way in which he formulated in the seventh thesis his now familiar three slogans for Russia’s bourgeois democratic revolution: “a struggle against the tsarist monarchy and Great-Russian, Pan-Slavist chauvinism, and advocacy of a revolution in Russia, as well as of the liberation of and self-determination for nationalities oppressed by Russia, coupled with the immediate slogans of a democratic republic, the confiscation of the landed estates, and an eight-hour working day.”

With the Central Committee in exile in agreement, Lenin then submitted his theses to the Bolshevik Duma deputies in order that they organize—since they were the only party unit in a position to do so—a more representative meeting to debate and discuss them in order that they become official party policy. The long-existent Bolshevik practice of making collective decisions even under the very arduous conditions of court-martial-ruled Russia made such a meeting possible. In their updated version, “The War and Russian Social-Democracy,” he praised the fraction for its stance on July 26—his reservations about the joint statement with the Mensheviks notwithstanding:

Our Party, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, has made, and will continue to make great sacrifices in connection with the war. The whole of our working-class legal press has been suppressed. Most working-class associations have been disbanded, and a large number of our comrades have been arrested and exiled. Yet our parliamentary representatives—the Russian Social-Democratic Labor group in the Duma—considered it their imperative socialist duty not to vote for the war credits, and even to walk out of the Duma, so as to express their protest the more energetically; they considered it their duty to brand the European governments’ policy as imperialist. Though the tsar’s government has increased its tyranny tenfold, the Social-Democratic workers of Russia are already publishing their first illegal manifestos against the war, thus doing their duty to democracy and to the International.16

After taking as many precautions as possible, the five Bolshevik deputies held a secret meeting on the outskirts of Petrograd in early November with seven party delegates from various locales—elected in meetings that the deputies helped organize—who had successfully eluded very tight police surveillance. Kamenev, who represented the Central Committee, joined them from Finland. The main agenda item, Lenin’s theses, was taken up on the second day of the conference, and according to Badayev, “no objections were raised to the principles outlined, although certain formal amendments were suggested . . . But before the conference could complete its work, the police broke into the room and arrested everyone present.”17 “This is terrible,” Lenin said upon hearing the news. “We must be ready for the very worst: falsification of documents, forgeries, planting of ‘evidence,’ false witnesses, trial behind closed doors, etc., etc . . . At all events, the work of our Party has now become 100 times more difficult. And still we shall carry it on! Pravda has trained up thousands of class-conscious workers out of whom, in spite of all difficulties, a new collective of leaders—the Russian C.C. of the Party—will be formed . . . Times are difficult, but . . . we shall get through!”18

“A Model of Revolutionary Parliamentarism”: The Trial of the Bolshevik Deputies

Lenin’s fears about the fallout from the arrests of the deputies, Kamenev, and the others were warranted. The government’s second public announcement about the arrest of the five Bolshevik deputies said they were attending a conference that “was engaged in discussing a resolution which stated that ‘the least evil is the defeat of the tsarist autocracy and its army’ and in which the slogan was advanced ‘to carry on as widely as possible among the troops propaganda for a socialist revolution’ and ‘the organization of illegal cells in the army.’”19 As well as Lenin’s theses, the police confiscated other incriminating evidence, the most damaging being the records of Martei Muranov, the deputy who represented the workers in Kharkov province. They detailed how he used his Duma post to do illegal work. The regime now had the smoking gun it had been looking for to deprive the Bolsheviks of their parliamentary immunity and put them on trial for violating martial law. The Petrograd party committee issued a leaflet denouncing the arrests of the five deputies and called on workers to stage protest meetings and one-day strikes. Despite massive steps the government took to prevent that from happening, a few actions did take place. But it was clear the patriotic offensive had sapped the revolutionary energy in place only a few months earlier. As the leaflet put it, “The war and the state of martial law has enabled the government to carry out their attack on the workers’ deputies, who were so valiantly defending the interests of the proletariat.”

To the surprise of the five arrestees, they learned that they would not be tried by court martial, which would have meant the death penalty, but in an ordinary court. Nicholas, himself, made the decision. He did so, the fraction felt, because by the time the trial was to take place, early 1915, the patriotic wave was beginning to ebb as setbacks on the battlefields began to mount and the workers’ movement was beginning to recover. “The government could no longer count on the news of the punishment of the workers’ deputies being received with patriotic shouts of joy.” At the same time, the Black Hundred progovernment press, as the trial date approached, sought to paint the Bolshevik deputies in the worst possible light from a chauvinist/patriotic perspective. A frequent complaint was their failure to follow the example of their Western European counterparts when the Great War began:

These unworthy bearers of a high title . . . played into the hands of Germany so obviously that there can be no question of any innocent error on their part while acting in conformity with the pernicious teaching of Socialism. Socialists exist in other countries too, but everywhere, in England, France and Belgium, the moment the war was declared, they renounced their internal struggles and joined the national ranks against the formidable enemy, German militarism.

Even German Socialists renounced their Utopias for the duration of the war and are behaving like their bourgeois friends. It is only to Russian workers that the honorable Duma Socialists give their advice to act on theories of non-resistance to evil, peace at any price, etc., and it is only Russian Socialists who attempt to stir up internal disorders in war time.

As the trial drew nearer, Bolshevik organizations, against enormous odds, issued leaflets and organized workplace meetings to counter the slander campaign. The leaflet on the eve of the trial declared, “Comrades! It is the working class which is in the dock, represented by deputies who were elected by the workers and who have acted in complete agreement with the workers . . . Strike on February 10, arrange meetings and demonstrations, protest against the tsarist mockery of the working class.” While the stranglehold the regime still held on Russia prevented any large-scale protests, millions of workers now knew about the Bolshevik deputies and their politics, particularly their antiwar stances, owing to the pro and counter campaigns.

The trial itself was, as Lenin predicted, orchestrated and offered no surprises. The chief prosecutor repeated, for example, the complaint that the Bolshevik deputies hadn’t acted like their namesakes in Western Europe by having “‘voted for war credits and proved to be friends of the government.’” The regime also “took steps to suppress any speeches and evidence which might be used for agitational purpose. The military censorship ruthlessly cut out whole passages from the reports of the trial.”20 However, in order to make its case, the government inadvertently exposed, as Lenin put it, “a model of . . . revolutionary Social Democracy making use of parliamentarism.” Exhibit A was the testimony of Muranov, who, rather than disowning his notes that the police had seized, took the proverbial bull by the horns: “‘Realizing that the people did not return me to the Duma just to warm my seat there, I travelled about the country to ascertain the mood of the working class.’ He admitted that he had undertaken the functions of a secret agitator of our Party, that in the Urals he organized workers’ committees at the Verkhneisetsky Works, and elsewhere.”21 The trial “‘uncovered’ only a fraction of the activities our comrades were conducting in this field.” Other fraction members “travelled, for propaganda purposes, throughout almost the whole of Russia and . . . Muranov, Petrovsky, Badayev and others arranged numerous workers’ meetings, at which anti-war resolutions were passed, and so on.”

Lenin admitted that some fraction members, in an effort to escape the possibility of capital punishment, had not acquitted themselves as principled as had Muranov—“who at the trial behaved better than the rest”22—and that opponents were trying to use that fact to impugn the integrity of Bolshevik politics. They were trying to obscure the real issue at stake: how to make use of the parliamentary arena. As opposed to the

European (i.e. servile) “socialist” parliamentarism . . . there are different kinds of parliamentarism . . . Some utilize the parliamentary arena in order to win the favor of their governments, or, at best, to wash their hands of everything, like the Chkheidze [Menshevik] group. Others utilize parliamentarism in order to remain revolutionary to the end, to perform their duty as Socialists and internationalists even under the most difficult circumstances. The parliamentary activities of some bring them into ministerial seats; the parliamentary activities of others bring them—to prison, to exile, to penal servitude. Some serve the bourgeoisie, others—the proletariat. Some are social-imperialists. Others are revolutionary Marxists.23

There was an even more significant dimension about the proceedings, Lenin argued: “Thanks to the trial, the words cited in the indictment: ‘The guns should be directed, not against our brothers, the wage slaves of other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries’—these words will spread—and have already done so—all over Russia as a call for proletarian internationalism, for the proletarian revolution. Thanks to the trial, the class slogan of the vanguard of the workers of Russia has reached the masses of the workers.”24 The trial and its coverage in the press did more to publicize the antiwar stance of the Bolsheviks than anything prior to then. A few months afterward, Lenin, most prophetically, wrote, “We cannot tell whether a powerful revolutionary movement will develop immediately after this war, or during it, etc., but at all events, it is only work in this direction that deserves the name of socialist work. The slogan of a civil war is the one that summarizes and directs this work, and helps unite and consolidate those who wish to aid the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against its own government and its own bourgeoisie.”25 Not surprisingly, the five Bolsheviks were found guilty and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. But unlike that of their comrades in the Second Duma, their stay in the Czar’s prisons would be of shorter duration—exactly because the Great War began to develop into a civil war.

Without a Duma fraction, Lenin sought out any remaining legal space. Just such an opportunity arose when the government agreed to allow workers in the war industries to elect in the fall of 1915 representatives to committees established by the capitalist owners. Precisely because this was a thinly veiled attempt to get workers on board the war train that was increasingly unpopular by pretending that they would have some say so in the actual management of the industries, it opened a debate among the opposition about whether to participate. This was not unlike the debates about the elections for the First and Second Dumas—to boycott or not. The monarchy, in fact, had just prorogued the Fourth Duma because of increasing criticism of its conduct of the war by the Octobrists and other parties. Given the growing revival of the revolutionary process, the regime needed to improve its public image.

Based on “advice from comrades in Russia,” Lenin made the following proposal: “We are opposed to participation in the war industries committees, which help prosecute the imperialist and reactionary war. We are in favor of utilizing the election campaign; for instance, we are for participation in the first stage of the elections for the sole purpose of agitation and organization.” And to be clear about what was and was not being proposed, he added, “There can be no talk of boycotting the Duma. Participation in the second ballot is essential. While we have no Duma deputies from our Party, we must utilize everything that happens in the Duma so as to advance the aims of revolutionary Social-Democracy.”26 Even Nicholas’s suspension of the Fourth Duma could not dissuade Lenin from utilizing it whenever it resumed.

True to their word, the Bolsheviks used the elections to the war industries committees to campaign against the war. After the first round of the elections, their resolution that called for a boycott of the committees and a revolutionary solution to the war garnered more delegate support than that of the Menshevik-liquidators. Since they chose not to participate in the second round of the process—demanded by the bosses, who didn’t like the outcome of the first round—the Menshevik position to participate in the committees prevailed. But the overall balance sheet fell far short of what the bourgeoisie wanted: “As a result of Bolshevik propaganda, elections to the ‘workers’ groups’ [for the committees] were held in only 70 areas out of a total of 239, and workers representatives were actually elected only in 36 areas.”27

Along with the proposal to participate in the elections to the war industries committees, Lenin addressed in “Several Theses” two related issues that had been raised in the discussion inside Russia—both of which would soon be at the center of his politics. One concerned the demand for a constituent assembly:

The slogan of a “constituent assembly” is wrong as an independent slogan, because the question now is: who will convene it? The liberals accepted that slogan in 1905 because it could have been interpreted as meaning that a “constituent assembly” would be convened by the tsar and would be in agreement with him. The most correct slogans are the “three pillars” (a democratic republic, confiscation of the landed estates and an eight-hour working day), with the addition (cf. No. 9) of a call for the workers’ international solidarity in the struggle for socialism and the revolutionary overthrow of the belligerent governments, and against the war.

As had always been the case for Lenin, the demand for a constituent assembly depended on the context—the objective tasks and pace of the movement.

The other issue, the all-important question of 1917, was posed because some Bolsheviks thought that the elections to the war industries committees opened up the possibility for such a demand. Lenin demurred: “Soviets of Workers’ Deputies and similar institutions must be regarded as organs of insurrection, of revolutionary rule. It is only in connection with the development of a mass political strike and with an insurrection, and in the measure of the latter’s preparedness, development and success that such institutions can be of lasting value.”28

A constituent assembly or soviet government? No debate would dominate the political discourse in 1917 (when insurrectionary conditions did unfold) and afterward as much as this question. Lenin’s theses of 1915, informed by all that he had said before, anticipated the stances he would take in that debate.

Lenin’s ninth thesis, the one he drew attention to, is also worth noting, because it made clear that his revolutionary defeatist stance was applicable not just to a Czarist government: “If the revolutionary chauvinists won in Russia, we would be opposed to a defense of their ‘fatherland’ in the present war. Our slogan is: against the chauvinists, even if they are revolutionary and republican against them, and for an alliance of the international proletariat for the socialist revolution.” Even if the Romanov dynasty were overthrown, the Bolsheviks would continue to call for a defeat of Russia’s armies if the new regime pursued an imperialist course without the titular leadership of Nicholas. They proved to be true to their word.

To appreciate what the Bolsheviks lost with the arrests of their five comrades, consider Lenin’s anxious letter in October 1916 to his primary contact, based in Sweden, with the Russian movement, A. G. Shlyapnikov: “The most pressing question now is the weakness of contacts between us and leading workers in Russia!! No correspondence!! . . . We can’t go on like that. We cannot organize either the publication of leaflets or transport, either agreement about manifestos or sending over their drafts, etc., etc., without regular secret correspondence. That is the key question! . . . Two-thirds of the contacts, as a minimum, in each city, should be with leading workers, i.e., they should write themselves, themselves master secret correspondence (artists are made, not born), should themselves each train up 1–2 ‘heirs’ in case of arrest. This should not be entrusted to the intelligentsia alone. Certainly not. It can and must be done by the leading workers. Without this it is impossible to establish continuity and purpose in our work—and that is the main thing.”29 A year later, exactly, the situation would be far different—owing in large part to what the Duma fraction had been able to accomplish before being exiled to Siberia.

“Revolutionary Parliamentarism” for a New International

Lenin’s aforementioned points about “different kinds of parliamentarism” came in a document, Socialism and War—Zinoviev was coauthor—for what would be the founding meeting of the Communist or Third International, the famous Zimmerwald Conference of 1915. For the minority of European social democrats who saw the vote for war credits by the majority of Second International parties as a betrayal of the historic Marxist program, only one conclusion could be drawn—a new international had to be constructed. The pressing agenda item for the 38 delegates from 11 European countries who gathered in the small Swiss town that September was how to respond, in contrast to most social democrats, to the war in a revolutionary way. In the process they addressed other programmatic issues, and for Lenin none was as important as clarity on the Marxist approach to doing electoral and parliamentary work. After all, he contended—already noted in his first pronouncement on the war—a major factor in the “betrayal of socialism” by Western European social democracy was due to their “making a fetish of the necessary utilization of bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois legality, and forgetting that illegal forms of organization and agitation are imperative at times of crises.”

Shortly before writing Socialism and War, Lenin, in preparing for the Zimmerwald meeting, offered a more detailed examination of the “betrayal” in his The Collapse of the Second International. Legality at any price, he argued, exemplified by the German party, doomed most social democratic parties. Once the war began, the “initiation of revolutionary activities would obviously have led to the dissolution of these legal organizations by the police, and the old party—from Legien [the German party leader whose trip to the United States earned, as noted in Chapter 2, Lenin’s ire] to Kautsky inclusively—sacrificed the revolutionary aims of the proletariat for the sake of preserving the present legal organizations. No matter how much this may be denied, it is a fact. The proletariat’s right to revolution was sold for a mess of pottage—organizations permitted by the present police law.” Employing the tactics of warfare as an analogy, Lenin proposed, beginning hypothetically, an alternative, revolutionary course for the electoral and parliamentary arenas:

Today there is no revolutionary situation, the conditions that cause unrest among the masses or heighten their activities do not exist; today you are given a ballot paper—take it, learn to organize so as to use it as a weapon against your enemies, not as a means of getting cushy legislative jobs for men who cling to their parliamentary seats for fear of having to go to prison. Tomorrow your ballot paper is taken from you and you are given a rifle or a splendid and most up-to-date quick-firing gun—take this weapon of death and destruction, pay no heed to the mawkish snivelers who are afraid of war; too much still remains in the world that must be destroyed with fire and sword for the emancipation of the working class; if anger and desperation grow among the masses, if a revolutionary situation arises, prepare to create new organizations and use these useful weapons of death and destruction against your own government and your own bourgeoisie . . . This form of the class struggle stands in the same relation to participation in elections as an assault against a fortress stands in relation to maneuvering, marches, or lying in the trenches. It is not so often that history places this form of struggle on the order of the day, but then its significance is felt for decades to come. Days on which such method of struggle can and must be employed are equal to scores of years of other historical epochs.

While Lenin’s perspective about the necessity of illegal work was clearly informed by the Russian experience, he didn’t limit it to such settings where political space was severely circumscribed: “Not only in wartime but positively in any acute political situation, to say nothing of periods of revolutionary mass action of any kind, the governments of even the freest bourgeois countries will threaten to dissolve the legal organizations, seize their funds, arrest their leaders, and threaten other ‘practical consequences’ of the same kind. What are we to do then? Justify the opportunists on these grounds, as Kautsky does? But this would mean sanctifying the transformation of the social democratic parties into national liberal-labour parties.” The government of one of the “freest bourgeois countries” proved Lenin right three years later when it jailed Socialist Party of America leader Eugene V. Debs for his antiwar stance. Twenty six years later, followers of Lenin in Minneapolis, Minnesota, witnessed the “arrest of their leaders” because of their opposition to the Roosevelt administration’s war drive—a half year before Pearl Harbor!30

The war, Lenin contended, had demonstrated that “pure legalism, the legalism-and-nothing-but-legalism of the ‘European’ parties, is now obsolete and, as a result of the development of capitalism in the pre-imperialist stage, has become the foundation for a bourgeois labor policy. It must be augmented by the creation of an illegal basis, an illegal organization, illegal Social-Democratic work, without, however, surrendering a single legal position.” And there was no better example, he argued, of how to combine the two than what the five Bolshevik deputies had done: “Muranov, the workers’ deputy in the Duma, who at the trial behaved better than the rest and was exiled to Siberia, clearly demonstrated that—besides ‘ministeriable’ parliamentarism . . . there can be illegal and revolutionary parliamentarism. Let the Kosovskys and Potresovs [Mensheviks] admire the ‘European’ parliamentarism of the lackeys or accept it—we shall not tire of telling the workers that such legalism, such Social-Democracy of the Legien, Kautsky . . . brand, deserves nothing but contempt.”31

For the follow-up meeting to the Zimmerwald conference, eight months later in 1916, Lenin submitted, in the name of the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, eight proposals for discussion. Most relevant is, first, an excerpt from the third: “Socialists do not refuse to fight for reform. Even now, for example, they must vote in parliament for improvements, however slight, in the condition of the masses, for increased relief to the inhabitants of the devastated areas, for the lessening of national oppression, etc. But it is sheer bourgeois deception to preach reforms as a solution for problems for which history and the actual political situation demand revolutionary solutions.” Again, there’s nothing here that Lenin had not already stated in one form or another for at least two decades. Its significance is that it was put forward as part of a campaign to win other forces, this time outside of Russia, to it and the other proposals as part of building a new international movement.

That was also the case with the seventh proposal, which in many ways was a reiteration of what he raised at the earlier meeting but with added political content:

On the question of socialist parliamentary action, it must be born in mind that the Zimmerwald resolution not only expresses sympathy for the five Social-Democratic deputies in the State Duma, who belong to our Party, and who have been sentenced to exile to Siberia, but also expresses its solidarity with their tactics. It is impossible to recognize the revolutionary struggle of the masses while resting content with exclusively legal socialist activity in parliament. This can only arouse legitimate dissatisfaction among the workers, cause them to desert Social-Democracy for anti-parliamentary anarchism or syndicalism. It must be stated clearly and publicly that Social-Democratic members of parliament must use their position not only to make speeches in parliament, but also to render all possible aid outside parliament to the underground organization and the revolutionary struggle of the workers, and that the masses themselves, through their illegal organization, must supervise these activities of their leaders.32

Lenin’s point, made not for the first time, that social democratic opportunism in the electoral arena and the reformism it bred—again, for Lenin fighting for reforms was not to be confused with reformism—gave “anti-parliamentary anarchism or syndicalism” a hearing has as much currency today as it did then. Witness the various global examples of the recent “occupation” movement in which anarcho-syndicalists were influential if not always hegemonic. Exactly because of the “betrayal” of modern-day social democracy could they appear as a credible working-class alternative.

Finally, there are Lenin’s (seldom appreciated) pronouncements based on his direct involvement in working-class politics in one of, as he put it, “the freest bourgeois” countries in the world—Switzerland. Forced exile, for two and a half years, allowed him to generalize his electoral/parliamentary political strategy and tactics beyond absolutist Russia.33 His “Tasks of the Left Zimmerwaldists in the Swiss Social-Democratic Party,” written in October–November 1916, is most instructive. As the title suggests, Lenin was a leader of the most revolutionary current within the party and sought to win the majority to its course with the document. Among the many proposals that addressed not only the war but domestic matters as well were those under the heading, “Pressing Democratic Reforms and Utilization of the Political Struggle and Parliamentarism”:

16. Utilization of the Parliamentary tribune and the right of initiative and referendum, not in a reformist manner, in order to advocate reforms “acceptable” to the bourgeoisie, and therefore powerless to remove the principal and fundamental evils suffered by the masses . . .

17. Abolition of all restrictions without exception on the political rights of women compared with those of men . . .

18. Compulsory naturalization . . . of all foreigners, free of charge . . . The disfranchisement and alienation of foreign workers serve to increase political reaction, which is already mounting, and weaken international proletarian solidarity . . .

19. Immediate propaganda for Social Democratic candidates in the 1917 Nationalrat [National Council] elections to be nominated only on the basis of a political platform that has been previously widely discussed by the electors.34

Further on in the document he specified what he meant by utilizing the parliamentary space in a nonreformist manner. Regarding the proposal for political equality for women, whether it was Lenin who first raised this demand in the Swiss party is uncertain, but it was not until 1971 that women gained the right to vote in Switzerland. In Russia, on the other hand, suffrage for women was one of the first acts of the new Bolshevik-led government. Last, he included a proposal on greater accountability and democratic functioning in the Swiss party.

In hindsight, all these documents, especially the platform for the Swiss party, constitute Lenin’s initial drafting of what would eventually become the norms of communist electoral and parliamentary work wherever branches of the new international existed.

From February to October

Though Lenin declared, in a public lecture in Switzerland on January 9, 1917 (the twelfth anniversary of the beginning of the 1905 revolution), that “Europe is pregnant with revolution,” he did not realize how soon the baby would arrive.35 Long before, however, he correctly anticipated the way it would: “[I]t is quite possible, and historically much more probable,” he wrote in 1901, “that the autocracy will collapse under the impact of one of the spontaneous outbursts or unforeseen political complications which constantly threaten it from all sides. But no political party that wishes to avoid adventurous gambles can base its activities on the anticipation of such outbursts and complications. We must go our own way, and we must steadfastly carry on our regular work, and the less our reliance on the unexpected, the less the chance of our being caught unawares by any ‘historic turns.’” The fact is that he was “caught unawares” when the February Revolution began, but precisely because of having gone their “own way” and done “regular work” could he and the Bolsheviks quickly rebound, get their revolutionary feet, and eventually be victorious. The focus here cannot for obvious reasons be the richness of the transition from the February to the October Revolution but how, in a distilled presentation, the decadelong Duma experience informed Lenin’s strategy and tactics for the Bolshevik ascent to power.

“Soviets of Workers’ Deputies Must Be Organized”

With the abdication of Nicholas II on March 2, a provisional government composed of various opposition forces in the Fourth Duma was instituted. Lenin, who was still in exile, reacted critically to one of its first proclamations:

In its manifesto, the new government promises every kind of freedom, but has failed in its direct and unconditional duty immediately to implement such freedoms as election of officers, etc., by the soldiers, elections to the St. Petersburg, Moscow and other City Councils on a basis of genuinely universal, and not merely male, suffrage, make all government and public buildings available for public meetings, appoint elections to all local institutions and Zemstvos, likewise on the basis of genuinely universal suffrage, repeal all restrictions on the rights of local government bodies, dismiss all officials appointed to supervise local government bodies, introduce not only freedom of religion, but also freedom from religion, immediately separate the school from the church and free it of control by government officials, etc . . . Soviets of Workers’ Deputies must be organized, the workers must be armed. Proletarian organizations must be extended to the army (which the new government has likewise promised political rights) and to the rural areas. In particular there must be a separate class organization for farm laborers.36

Lenin’s proposals were consistent with the historical program of the RSDLP and all that he’d been advocating about the electoral process and representative democracy for at least a decade. With necessary adjustments, they came to constitute the core of what he would struggle for in the next eight months.

Shortly afterward, Lenin addressed another issue that figured significantly in Russia’s political debates for the next ten months. To one of the first group of Bolsheviks returning to Russia after the February Revolution, he responded to a request about the tactics they should pursue: “[N]o trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is especially suspect; arming of the proletariat is the only guarantee; immediate elections to the Petrograd City Council; no rapprochement with other parties.” Because press reports contributed some confusion about his telegrammed advice, he clarified with a letter. First, what he sent was written “in the name of the Central Committee members living abroad, not in the name of the Central Committee itself.” Second, and more important, “[r]eference is not to the Constituent Assembly, but to elections to municipal bodies. Elections to the Constituent Assembly are, so far, merely an empty promise. Elections to the Petrograd City Council could and should be held immediately, if the government is really capable of introducing its promised freedoms. These elections could help the proletariat organize and strengthen its revolutionary positions.”37 If Lenin had reservations about the constituent assembly—which he voiced, as already noted, in 1915—he harbored no qualms about plunging back into the electoral arena. For him it was mostly about picking up from where the Bolsheviks had left off before the arrest of their deputies in November 1914 and for the same reasons—to advance the revolution.

Prior to his return to Petrograd, Lenin penned his now famous “Letters from Afar,” in which he outlined his vision for the next stage in Russia’s revolution. Especially relevant were his comments on the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies formed in Petrograd—a reflection, he said, of the lessons of 1905 and the Paris Commune. That it was “drawing in soldiers’ deputies, and, undoubtedly deputies from rural wage-workers, and then (in one form or another) from the entire peasant poor” was most encouraging. The inclusion of the soldiers’ deputies gave license to say that the Soviet comprised “over 1,500 deputies of workers and peasants dressed in soldiers’ uniform.” “The prime and most important task, and one that brooks no delay, is to set up organizations of this kind in all parts of Russia without exception, for all trades and strata of the proletarian and semi-proletarian population without exception . . . I shall mention that for the entire mass of the peasantry our Party . . . should especially recommend Soviets of wage-workers and Soviets of small tillers who do not sell grain, to be formed separately from the well-to-do peasants.” Just as Lenin strove to use the Dumas to construct the worker-peasant alliance, he was now advocating that the soviets be the vehicle for doing that—a far more democratic representative body, akin to the Paris Commune.

Of crucial importance for the effectiveness of the soviets, he emphasized, was the organization of a “genuine people’s militia, i.e., one that, first, consists of the entire population, of all adult citizens of both sexes; and, second, one that combines the functions of a people’s army with police functions, with the functions of the chief and fundamental organ of public order and public administration.” He underscored the necessity of including women in the militias: “If women are not drawn into public service, into the militia, into political life, if women are not torn out of their stupefying house and kitchen environment, it will be impossible to guarantee real freedom, it will be impossible to build even democracy let alone socialism.” Organizing the soviets and their militias on this basis pointed the way forward to the replacement of the old state apparatus with a new one needed for the “transition from that first stage of the revolution to the second.”38 Again, the lessons of the Commune figured significantly in his vision, and thus, as he explained elsewhere, the soviets were “the harbinger of the ‘withering away’ of the state in every form.”39

“Not a Parliamentary Republic”

Lenin’s task, once he returned to Russia, was to win the rest of the Bolshevik leadership to his perspective. Except for Kollantai, most of them, as once before, displayed conciliationist tendencies, this time toward the provisional government. Within hours of his arrival in Petrograd on April 3, he delivered what has come to be called his “April Theses” and had them published in the now resurrected Pravda. After addressing in the first of the ten theses the war question, he turned to, in the next four, the “basic question of every revolution,” as he later put it: “state power.”

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 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.

3) No support for the Provisional Government . . .

4) Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority . . . As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticizing 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 Laborers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.

As for the future, “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.” Last, “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.”40

Lenin’s objection to “a parliamentary republic” did not in the least signify a retreat from his long-standing advocacy for representative democracy. To the contrary, he reaffirmed that stance by arguing that soviets, an increasing reality as a result of the February events, were a superior form of such democracy because of the way in which they were created and their modus operandi. His other well-known article of that period, “The Dual Power,” distilled what he considered to be their model:

This power is of the same type as the Paris Commune41 of 1871. The fundamental characteristics of this type are: (1) the source of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas—direct “seizure,” to use a current expression; (2) the replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves; (3) officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people’s first demand; they are reduced to the position of simple agents; from a privileged group holding “jobs” remunerated on a high, bourgeois scale, they become workers of a special “arm of the service,” whose remuneration does not exceed the ordinary pay of a competent worker.42

No better concise description of the Commune exists in the annals of Marxism—the product of two decades of research, writing, and lecturing on the topic. In the subsequent debate with Kamenev and other Bolsheviks in defense of his theses, Lenin was even clearer: “The parliamentary bourgeois republic hampers and stifles the independent political life of the masses, their direct participation in the democratic organization of the life of the state from the bottom up. The opposite is the case with the Soviets.”43 The oft-made claim, then, that Lenin lacked a democratic vision—and thus the Stalinist outcome of the Bolshevik revolution—is groundless.

In calling for the transference of power from the provisional government to the soviets, Lenin, Kamenev charged, was abandoning the more than decade-long Bolshevik demand for the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry—its virtue being a strategy for winning the majority to Russia’s bourgeois democratic revolution. Lenin disagreed and pedagogically explained why: “The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already been realized, but in a highly original manner, and with a number of extremely important modifications.” It had been realized, Lenin contended, in the form of the soviets. But rather than take power, they, specifically the soviet in Petrograd, ceded it to the bourgeois provisional government. The tasks for “communists”—the label Lenin increasingly employed in place of the now soiled “social democracy”—was to convince the soviets to take power for themselves. “As long as we are in the minority,” as the fourth thesis put it, “‘patient’ explaining” was necessary to win “the majority of the deputies in all (or in most) Soviets” to the view that the provisional government did not serve the interest of Russia’s producers.44

The Central Committee made clear in a resolution adopted on April 22 that the Bolsheviks were not demanding immediate transference of power to the soviets despite such calls at a protest two days earlier against the provisional government:

The slogan “Down with the Provisional Government!” is an incorrect one at the present moment because, in the absence of a solid (i.e., a class-conscious and organized) majority of the people on the side of the revolutionary proletariat, such a slogan is either an empty phrase, or, objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character.

We shall favor the transfer of power to the proletarians and semi-proletarians only when the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies adopt our policy and are willing to take the power into their own hands.45

Again, “patient explanation” to win the majority of the soviets to transference was the immediate task—exactly the tactic Lenin advised for the RSDLP fractions in the four Dumas from 1906 to 1914 to convince the Trudovik peasant deputies to break with the Cadet liberals in order to forge the worker-peasant alliance. That experience—unappreciated until now—plus the force of argument, the betrayals of the provisional government, and the greater democratic space that existed after February ensured that Lenin’s strategy would prove successful this time.

Soviet rule didn’t mean opposition to republican government. But it meant something quite different from a “‘parliamentary’ republic”:

The people need a republic in order to educate the masses in the methods of democracy. We need not only representation along democratic lines, but the building of the entire state administration from the bottom up by the masses themselves, their effective participation in all of life’s steps, their active role in the administration. Replacement of the old organs of oppression, the police, the bureaucracy, the standing army, by a universal arming of the people, by a really universal militia, is the only way to guarantee the country a maximum of security against the restoration of the monarchy and to enable it to go forward firmly, systematically and resolutely towards socialism, not by “introducing” it from above, but by raising the vast mass of proletarians and semi-proletarians to the art of state administration, to the use of the whole state power.46

A month after Lenin’s return, Trotsky arrived in Petrograd, also from a more than decadelong exile. “I arranged with Comrade Kamenev”—his brother-in-law, by the way—“for a visit to the editorial office of Pravda on one of the first days after my arrival. The first meeting must have taken place on the 5th or 6th of May. I told Lenin that nothing separated me from his April theses and from the whole course that the party had taken since his arrival.”47 Three weeks later Lenin referred to him as “Comrade Trotsky.”48 The two had been bitter opponents since 1903 when Trotsky accused Lenin of being a Jacobinist—the debut of that timeworn charge—or, more condescendingly, “a caricature of Robespierre.”49 Three months before their meeting Lenin called him a “swine” for not aligning with the Left Zimmerwaldists.50 It speaks volumes about the two of them and their politics that all that was now water under the bridge—arguably the most consequential reconciliation in the annals of politics.51 From either “the 5th or 6th of May” 1917, both, until the ends of their lives, saw themselves as comrades in struggle.

“All Power to the Soviets”

To bring the entire Bolshevik party on board to Lenin’s theses required a delegated party meeting. The weeklong Seventh All-Russia Conference in April was the first legal Bolshevik gathering in Russia, with 133 voting delegates representing 80,000 members and 18 with voice—the most representative to date. The “freest of all the belligerent countries in the world,” as Lenin called post-February Russia, made that possible. Also attending the conference were the five Fourth Duma deputies and the surviving ones from the Second Duma, freed from Nicholas’s Siberian prisons.

The conference discussion around the soviets is of special relevance. Lenin ended the opening report on the current situation with the “what is to be done” question: “The Soviets must take power not for the purpose of building an ordinary bourgeois republic, nor for the purpose of making a direct transition to socialism. This cannot be. What, then, is the purpose? The Soviets must take power in order to make the first concrete steps towards this transition, steps that can and should be made . . . We cannot be for ‘introducing’ socialism—this would be the height of absurdity. We must preach socialism. The majority of the population in Russia are peasants, small farmers who can have no idea of socialism.”52 Despite what was achieved in February, Lenin was as sober as he had always been about what was and was not on the political agenda in Russia.

In the resolution on the soviets themselves, Lenin could be more specific:

This growth of the revolution in the provinces in depth and scope is, on the one hand, the growth of a movement for transferring all power to the Soviets and putting the workers and peasants themselves in control of production. On the other hand, it serves as a guarantee for the build-up of forces, on a national scale, for the second stage of the revolution, which must transfer all state power to the Soviets or to other organs directly expressing the will of the majority of the nation (organs of local self-government, the Constituent Assembly, etc.) . . .

It is, therefore, the task of the proletarian party, on the one hand, to support in every possible way the indicated development of the revolution locally, and, on the other to conduct a systematic struggle within the Soviets (by means of propaganda and new elections) for the triumph of the proletarian line.

The Conference repeats that it is necessary to carry out many-sided activity within the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, to increase the number of Soviets, to consolidate their power, and to weld together our Party’s proletarian internationalist groups within the Soviets.53

The resolution on the current situation, after five days of discussion and debate, composed by Lenin, concluded that the soviets could carry out practical work to deal with the real needs of the masses, “only when an overwhelming majority of the people has clearly and firmly realized the practical need for them; on the other hand their character guarantees that the reforms will not be sponsored by the police and officials, but will be carried out by way of voluntary participation of the organized and armed masses of the proletariat and peasantry in the management of their own affairs . . . Great care and discretion should be exercised in carrying out the above measures; a solid majority of the population must be won over and this majority must be clearly convinced of the country’s practical preparedness for any particular measure.”54 For Lenin, again for the umpteenth time, “only when an overwhelming majority of the people” came on board could the revolutionary project go forward, this time via the soviets. In the May 15 issue of Pravda, Lenin raised publicly for the first time the slogan, “All power to the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies! No confidence in the government of the capitalist!”55 The context makes clear that he did so for purposes of propaganda and not agitation—that is, to persuade rather than, at this time, to incite.

To underscore that the peasantry was still crucial in his equation for winning the majority to soviet governance, ten days later Lenin addressed a letter to the First All-Russia Congress of Peasants’ Deputies representing their recently created soviets throughout the country. While it was indisputable that “Russia must become a democratic republic,” the Bolshevik party, “the party of class-conscious workers and poor peasants, is . . . working for a democratic republic of another kind”—different from what the “majority of landowners and capitalists” wanted:

We want a republic where there is no police that browbeats the people; where all officials, from the bottom up, are elective and displaceable whenever the people demand it, and are paid salaries not higher than the wages of a competent worker; where all army officers are similarly elective and where the standing army separated from the people and subordinated to classes alien to the people is replaced by the universally armed people, by a people’s militia.

We want a republic where all state power, from the bottom up, belongs wholly and exclusively to the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, Peasants’, and other Deputies.

The workers and peasants are the majority of the population. The power must belong to them, not to the landowners or the capitalists.

The workers and peasants are the majority of the population. The power and the functions of administration must belong to their Soviets, not to the bureaucracy.56

A week later at the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, attended by more than a thousand delegates of whom the Bolsheviks and their allies comprised about 20 percent, Lenin reiterated his case for the need to transfer power to the soviets, despite the fact that there were now “near-socialist Ministers” such as Alexander Kerensky, a Socialist Revolutionary, in the provisional government. But this time he made what would be his constant refrain until October on why it was so necessary to do so. Only if the soviets took power, he implored the delegates, would the most pressing question confronting not just the producing classes in Russia but those elsewhere affected by the Guns of August be resolved—the war. As long as the soviets, the real power in Russia, conceded to the government of capitalists and landlords, the beneficiaries of the conflagration, the slaughter would continue. “Peace without annexations and indemnities”—that was the Bolshevik solution and what a government dominated by capitalists and landlords could never deliver. Because the latter had “a majority in the government the war will remain an imperialist war no matter what you write, no matter how eloquent you are, no matter how many near-socialist Ministers you have.” But unlike anywhere else in the world, Russia, owing to the events of February, produced an institution, the soviets, that had the ability to implement a real working-class peace policy: “The Soviets are an institution which does not exist in any ordinary bourgeois-parliamentary state and cannot exist side by side with a bourgeois government. They are the new, more democratic type of state which we in our Party resolutions call a peasant-proletarian democratic republic.”

Only one country in the world can at the moment take steps to stop the imperialist war on a class scale, in the face of the capitalists and without a bloody revolution. Only one country can do it, and that country is Russia. And she will remain the only one as long as the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies exists . . . If you were to take power into your hands, if power were to pass to the revolutionary organizations to be used for combating the Russian capitalists, then the working people of some countries would believe you and you could propose peace.57

When a provisional government minister declared at the congress that the soviets couldn’t take power because there was no party in them that was prepared to rule, Lenin famously replied—to both applause and laughter—“Yes, there is. No party can refuse this, and our Party certainly doesn’t. It is ready to take over full power at any moment.”

In a demonstration on June 18 that the Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary leadership of the Petrograd soviet called to rally support for itself, “most of the 400,000 marchers who came out did so under” the Bolshevik banner of “All Power to the Soviets,” much to the embarrassment of the former.58 Three weeks later on July 4, a half million did the same in an action the Bolsheviks called to protest the provisional government’s latest and unsuccessful battlefield offensive. In defending the demonstration and slogan, Lenin summarized what had transpired since the toppling of the Romanov dynasty:

During the several months that have passed since February 27 the will of the majority of the workers and peasants, of the overwhelming majority of the country’s population, has become clear in more than a general sense. Their will has found expression in mass organizations—the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.

How, then, can anyone oppose the transfer of all power in the state to the Soviets? Such opposition means nothing but renouncing democracy! It means no more no less than imposing on the people a government which admittedly can neither come into being nor hold its ground democratically, i.e., as a result of truly free, truly popular elections.59

Lenin defended the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” through to and after October, except for a moment beginning in mid-July. The context was the “July Days” when in response to the July 4 actions the provisional government went on a counterrevolutionary offensive.60 Not only was Pravda shut down, but Bolshevik leaders like Trotsky were arrested while others like Lenin had to go into hiding. The authorities were aided and abetted in this by the Socialist Revolutionary-Menshevik leadership of the soviets. On the run, Lenin wrote, “The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ was a slogan for peaceful development of the revolution which was possible in April, May, June, and up to July 5–9, i.e., up to the time when actual power passed into the hands of the military dictatorship. This slogan is no longer correct, for it does not take into account that power has changed hands and that the revolution has in fact been completely betrayed by the S.R.s and Mensheviks.”61 As long as the soviets advanced the democratic process—that is, the revolution—they were to be supported. But once they had become an obstacle, that support, he now argued, should be denied—the same reasoning that informed his opposition to the Bulygin Duma in the Revolution of 1905. Also, Lenin never made an organizational fetish about soviets—one of his earlier differences with Trotsky.62 Their appropriateness depended on the context of the class struggle. After debate and discussion, an overwhelming majority of the delegates to the party’s semiclandestine Sixth Congress at the end of July, which Lenin didn’t attend because he was in hiding, agreed with his argument.

By the beginning of September, however, when the revolution was on the offensive again, the Bolsheviks reembraced the slogan. Lenin made a “compromise” proposal to the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leadership: “The compromise on our part is our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets and a government of S.R.s and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets.” The Bolsheviks “would refrain from demanding the immediate transfer of power to the proletariat and the poor peasants and from employing revolutionary methods of fighting for this demand.” In exchange they would have “complete freedom of propaganda and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly without further delays or even at an earlier date.” Freedom to conduct propaganda, which also meant the unbanning of Pravda, went hand in hand with, parenthetically, “new elections” for the soviets: “The Bolsheviks would gain the opportunity of quite freely advocating their views and of trying to win influence in the Soviets under a really complete democracy . . . Under a Soviet government, such freedom would be possible . . . We have nothing to fear from real democracy, for reality is on our side, and even the course of development of trends within the S.R. and Menshevik parties, which are hostile to us, proves us right.”63 Lenin’s calculus proved accurate. The “new elections” to the soviets confirmed his prediction. As Trotsky put it about the new situation, seven weeks before the October Revolution, “the cry raised at the very beginning of the revolution by our party—‘All Power to the Soviets!’—has become the voice of the whole revolutionary country.”64

Elections and Electoral Norms

Except for a one-page party resolution, there are no sustained discussions in Lenin’s published corpus between February and October on elections, the tactics and strategy of campaigning, and related matters similar to what he produced in the run ups to the four Dumas.65 What does exist, however, makes certain that all he had done in the electoral arena before was as valid for him, if not more, in the heady days of 1917. New this time in post-February Russia, with implications for his electoral strategy, was ample political space.

The Fourth or State Duma was reconvened after the dethronement of Nicholas, but the fact that it figures only in passing in Lenin’s narrative testifies to its importance or lack thereof after February. His position had always been, going back to 1905, that soviets should be prioritized because they offered the greater possibility for genuine democratic governance—exactly what opened up with February. The aforementioned “truly free, truly popular elections” were indeed those to the soviets.

The election campaigns for the four State Dumas were always for Lenin an invaluable opportunity to educate workers on the differences between political parties—an experience that served him well for 1917. If there was one thing that characterized post-Nicholas Russia, it was the ubiquity of elections—this time not only to soviets but to local dumas as well. Immediately upon his return to Petrograd, he composed a piece of literature for mass distribution that resembled the leaflet he produced for the elections to the Second Duma in 1906 in which he laid out in three columns the differences between the Black Hundreds, the Cadets, and the social democrats (see Appendix C in the first volume, LES1905). The new piece appeared as articles intended for a leaflet but became a pamphlet for the July 4 demonstration. It retained the question/answer format but this time with answers for four categories of parties: “Parties and groups to the right of the Constitutional Democrats,” the “Constitutional Democrats and kindred groups,” the “Social-Democrats, the Socialist Revolutionaries and kindred groups,” and, last, “Bolsheviks, the party which properly should be called the Communist Party.”

Of significance here are the Bolshevik answers to three questions. As for what form of government they wanted, “A republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, Peasants’, and other Deputies. Abolition of the standing army and the police, who are to be replaced by the arming of the whole people; officials to be not only elective, but also displaceable; their pay not to exceed that of a competent worker.” If the elective principle applied to government officials, shouldn’t soldiers be able to elect their officers? “Not only must they be elected, but every step of every officer and general must be supervised by persons specially elected for the purpose by the soldiers.” And if civilians could displace government officials, shouldn’t soldiers enjoy the same right? “It is desirable and essential in every way. The soldiers will obey and respect only elected authorities.”66 Whether Lenin’s pamphlet impacted soldiers is uncertain. It may have helped to generalize practices that were already in place as mounting losses on the battlefield sparked increasing rank-and-file resistance to the commands of officers. What is known is that Bolshevik success in October was due in large part to the support they enjoyed among soldiers and sailors, and the promise of democracy and the elective principle—what no other party put in writing—no doubt made them attractive.

In many ways the pamphlet was a stand-in for a new party program. The old one, based on a unified Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and a pre-February 1917 political reality, needed revisions. Some months later, authorized by delegated party meetings, Lenin began to put together a draft. A number of innovations are of import. He expanded on the elective principle in his pamphlet by first making clear that soviet governance was now the goal of the party: “[P]arliamentary representative institutions will be gradually replaced by Soviets of people’s representatives (from various classes and professions, or from various localities), functioning as both legislative and executive bodies.” Under soviet democracy, and to be enshrined in a future constitution,

supreme power in the state must be vested entirely in the people’s representatives, who shall be elected by the people and be subject to recall at any time, and who shall constitute a single popular assembly, a single chamber . . . proportional representation at all elections; all delegates and elected officials, without exception, to be subject to recall at any time upon the decision of a majority of their electors . . . Judges and other officials, both civil and military, to be elected by the people with the right to recall any of them at any time by decision of a majority of their electors . . . Public education to be administered by democratically elected organs of local self-government . . . teachers to be elected directly by the population with the right of the latter to remove undesirable teachers.67

There is no mention in the draft party program, unlike in his pamphlet, of the elective principle for soldiers, no doubt because the “police and standing army,” as stated, were “to be replaced by the universally armed people.”

At the end of May the 12 districts of Petrograd held elections for their respective dumas. The appearance of Lenin’s soon-to-be pamphlet was most timely. At the party’s delegated City Conference in the third week in April, a debate took place on how the Bolsheviks should conduct themselves in the elections. A key issue concerned the character of the parties in contention and the related one of electoral blocs. The struggle, he argued, was between three party groupings, Cadets and parties to their right, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks who defended the war, and the Bolsheviks. Unlike the elections for the four State Dumas, proportional representation would be employed for those to the municipal dumas. There was, therefore, he proposed, “no need for a bloc”—that is, electoral blocs that the RSDLP sometimes entered into under the prior electoral rules; now “the minority is protected.” Nevertheless, “I am decidedly in favor of placing on our tickets the names of the Menshevik candidates who are breaking with chauvinism. This is no bloc.” His resolution that embodied these positions along with the basic stance that “under no circumstances can the municipal platform, particularly at the present revolutionary time, be reduced only to communal questions” was adopted—Lenin’s only published writing explicitly devoted to electoral policy between February and October (see Appendix G).

As the Petrograd elections were about to take place, Lenin pointed to “two shortcomings in our Party organization and Party work.” They concerned the Bolsheviks’ list of candidates for one of the wealthiest districts in the city:

Our list for Liteiny District has only 33 candidates as against the 63 of the Cadets and the Menshevik bloc . . . Apparently, our Party workers have not been able to find more than 33 candidates of the proletarian party in this wealthy district. But this is an obvious shortcoming in our work, an obvious indication that we have not gone down far enough into the midst of the working and exploited people. We must break with established custom. In the wealthy districts we must “go among the people” more energetically than ever, and waken more and more strata of the working and exploited people to political consciousness. We should get the non-party proletarian elements—especially the domestic servants for instance—to take an active part in the elections and not hesitate to put the most reliable of them into our proletarian list. Why should we fear a minority of non-party proletarian elements, when the majority are class-conscious internationalist proletarians?68

This admonition is most revealing because it suggests that while the published account of Lenin’s activities during 1917 is relatively sparse regarding his input into Bolshevik electoral activities for that year, he was still as much the hands-on campaign organizer, strategist, and taskmaster as he’d been for the elections for the four State Dumas. And the call to recruit “domestic servants” is even more telling but entirely consistent with everything he’d advocated and done before. “Comrade workers!” he urged in a Pravda article on the eve of the elections, “Let us all get down to work, canvassing all the poorest homes, awakening and enlightening the domestic servants, the most backward workers, etc., etc.”69

A few months later, elections to the Petrograd City Duma took place. William Rosenberg provides the most detailed account in English.70 Of significance are the gains the Bolsheviks made over the prior elections, a 14 percent improvement, which foreshadowed their future fortunes. Given all that was at stake in the aftermath of the “July Days,” the party went into full campaign mode, not only in Petrograd but in Moscow—where they increased their vote by 40 percent—and other locations where local duma elections were to take place. Keep in mind that this was the moment when the Bolsheviks were having second thoughts about the soviets as the best vehicle for democracy from below. If the soviets were in doubt, then local dumas (or, more specifically, the elections to them) would allow the party to measure what Engels had once said made elections so valuable for the revolutionary process and that Lenin knew all too well: the mood of the masses for the employment of armed struggle. In fact, and crucial evidence for one of the arguments of this book, subsequent memoirs say they regarded their gains “not only as a means of ‘taking the revolutionary temperature of the masses,’ but also as a potential aid in seizing power.”71 To recall Engels’s formulation in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and State: “On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know where they stand.” A month after the counterrevolutionary offensive and two months before the October Revolution, such readings of public sentiment were more than ever needed.

Of tremendous assistance to the Bolshevik campaigns was the start-up of two party newspapers, Proletary and Soldat, in place of the banned Pravda. The Bolsheviks, as they could do for the State Duma elections, were now able to disseminate their program on a mass scale. Very reminiscent of the campaign literature Lenin had once written was the appeal to voters in three issues of Proletary: “Every worker, peasant, and soldier must vote for our list because only our party is struggling staunchly and bravely against the raging counterrevolutionary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and large landowners. [Only our party] is fighting the reimposition of capital punishment, the destruction of worker and soldier organizations, and the suppression of all the freedoms won with the blood and sweat of the people. You must vote for our party because it alone is struggling bravely with the peasantry against large landowners, with workers against factory owners, with the oppressed everywhere against the oppressors.”72 This appeal and all the details of the campaign—the importance of Rosenberg’s account—make it hard to believe that Lenin (who, again, was on the run, probably why the extant paper trail is so incomplete) was not the orchestrator and largely responsible for what was achieved. After all, no Bolshevik knew more about how to conduct an effective and successful election campaign.

The best circumstantial evidence is provided by Krupskaya. After returning to Petrograd, “my work at the secretariat bored me more and more,” she wrote.

I wanted to get into real mass work. I also wanted to see Ilyich [Lenin] more often . . . The district Duma elections took place in June. I went to Vasilevsky Island to see what progress was being made in the election campaign . . . The elections to the district Dumas were over. I was elected to the Vyborg district council. The only candidates to be elected to this council were Bolsheviks and a few Menshevik-Internationalists . . . I learned a great deal from the work in the Vyborg district. It was a good school for Party and Soviet work. During the many years that I had lived abroad as a political exile, I never dared to make a speech even at a small meeting, and until that time I had never written a single line in Pravda. I needed such a school very much.73

Krupskaya’s education speaks volumes about what was opened for the Bolsheviks with the new opportunity for “mass work” through the local duma elections. Again, it’s highly unlikely that Lenin wasn’t intimately involved with her new and more fulfilling political life.

More decisive than the elections to the local dumas, however, as history would show, were those to the soviets. From the time of his return to Petrograd, Lenin recognized their importance. When the aforementioned crisis in April revealed that the leadership of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was becoming an obstacle to the revolution, he called “upon all the workers and soldiers . . . to send as delegates to the [soviet] only such comrades who express the will of the majority. In all cases where a delegate does not express the opinion of the majority, new elections should be held in the factories and the barracks.”74 Unlike for the local dumas, elections to the soviets were more frequent and included the right of recall, the details of which, however, are not captured in the extant published Lenin corpus. A decisive turning point in the revolution came in July when the Bolsheviks—who, in Trotsky’s words, “occupied a wholly insignificant sector” of the workers’ section of the Soviet in April—now constituted “two thirds of its members” as a result of by-elections in the factories. “That meant that among the masses their influence had become decisive.”75

Yet Lenin objected to the rules of representation in the Petrograd Soviet as new elections to it approached at the end of August. That “the soldiers have one representative to every 500 people, while the workers have 1:1000” was, he charged, a violation of democracy. “‘One representative, everywhere, to an equal number of electors’ is the ABC of democracy. Anything else is a fraud.” He urged the party to pass

a resolution demanding equal suffrage (both in the Soviets and at trade union congresses), branding the slightest departure from equality as a fraud—using exactly this word—as a Nicholas II method. This resolution of the plenary meeting of the Central Committee must be written in a language everybody can understand and spread in leaflet form among the mass of the workers.

We cannot tolerate a fraud of democracy if we call ourselves “democrats.” We are not democrats but unprincipled people if we tolerate this!!76

That the soviet failed to change its rules, owing mainly to Socialist Revolutionary opposition to Lenin’s proposal, doesn’t negate his democratic vision for how it should function. Despite this setback the Bolsheviks achieved a major victory in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets on August 31 and September 5, respectively, when an overwhelming majority of delegates in both bodies passed their motions calling for a rejection of any compromises with the bourgeoisie and the transfer of “All Power to the Soviets!”—testimony to the deepening of the revolutionary process. About this moment, Trotsky writes, “The city dumas, which had made an effort to compete with the soviets, died down in the days of danger and vanished. The Petrograd duma humbly sent its delegation to the Soviet ‘for an explanation of the general situation and the establishment of contact.’”77

The elective principle, last, applied to the party itself. Telling evidence that it was in full force after the February Revolution came in a comment Lenin made about the April 20 protest against the provisional government. Called for and organized by the Bolsheviks, the action went “a trifle more to the left” than planned, “a serious crime”—a problem of “disorganization” that had to be corrected. “Had we deliberately allowed such an act, we would not have remained in the Central Committee for one moment.”78 Lenin and other Central Committee members, in other words, would have been immediately recalled. Years of having to operate without elections did not dull Bolshevik sensibility for their need when the opportunity presented itself.

On the Eve of October

For more than a year, Lenin had been thinking about and working on what would be his last major writing before assuming the responsibilities that came with the October Revolution. State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, as the subtitle suggests, brought together in one text what he had been saying on the topic for some time, of urgent necessity given the likely course of events in Russia at the end of the summer of 1917—a document that could theoretically inform the process even if he couldn’t live to see its outcome.

The six-page section, “Abolition of Parliamentarism,” which immediately follows a detailed discussion on the Paris Commune, is relevant here. There is nothing fundamentally new in his critique of parliamentarism that Lenin hadn’t said before. Different this time was the way he framed the issue. The betrayal by the “practical socialists” of the basic lesson Marx and Engels had drawn about the Commune, that the working class cannot use parliamentary governance for socialist transformation, came with a political price—aside from the slaughter their fateful votes on August 4, 1914, enabled. By defanging Marx and Engels, they “have left all criticism of parliamentarism to the anarchists, and, on this wonderfully reasonable ground, they [the ‘practical socialists’] denounce all criticism of parliamentarism as ‘anarchism’!! It is not surprising that the proletariat of the ‘advanced’ parliamentary countries, disgusted with such ‘socialists’ . . . has been with increasing frequency giving its sympathies to anarcho-syndicalism, in spite of the fact that the latter is merely the twin brother of opportunism.” If this sounds descriptive of politics since the onset of the world capitalist crisis in 2008 where social democracy, the “practical socialists,” has been hegemonic, then it is.

But Marx, Lenin contended, did what the “present-day traitor to socialism” could not. He “knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for its inability to make use even of the ‘pigsty’ of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when the situation was obviously not revolutionary; but at the same time he knew how to subject parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism.” And it was the Commune, the living class struggle—what the producers had discovered on their own without, as Lenin was fond of saying, “the aid of any books”—that offered an alternative. Because of the actuality of socialist revolution in Russia in August 1917, he began to consider the implications of the Commune experience, his first concretization of what a socialist society would look like.

Important here is Lenin’s continued defense of representative democracy, despite the betrayals of “the present-day ‘Social-Democrat’”:

The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies. “The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.” . . . We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism, if criticism of bourgeois society is not mere words for us, if the desire to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our earnest and sincere desire, and not a mere “election” cry for catching workers’ votes.79

All this, once again, was consistent with what he had been saying for at least two decades. His views were informed not only by the reality of the Russian revolution from 1905 but, again, by the opportunity to live and do political work in what was widely regarded as a paragon of parliamentary democracy—Switzerland. About the two experiences, Krupskaya writes, “It seems to me that had Ilyich not lived through the 1905 revolution and the second period in exile, he would not have been able to write his book, State and Revolution.”80

What is apparently odd about this part of the text, especially since Lenin says in the preface that he’d address the lessons of 1905 to 1917, is the absence of any positive mention of the soviets, organs that he’d once lauded for their Commune-like characteristics. But there’s no mystery. As he explained three months later about what was missing, “I had no time to write a single line of the chapter; I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis—the eve of the October revolution of 1917. Such an ‘interruption’ can only be welcomed . . . It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.”81

Certainly, from the “July Days” until early September, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had doubts about the soviets as institutions of representative democracy to advance the interests of the proletariat—exactly when he was completing his book. But that skepticism soon evaporated. Again, in the first week of September, Lenin’s enthusiasm for the soviets, having performed heroically in beating back the counterrevolution, was rekindled. But the demand “Power to the Soviets,” as he warned at the end of September, had to be acted on: “Either all power goes to the Soviets and the army is made fully democratic, or another Kornilov affair occurs”—that is, another attempt at a counterrevolution.82

The debate among Bolsheviks in the lead-up to the October Revolution was whether they enjoyed sufficient support for leading an armed overthrow of the provisional government—an insurrection. Lenin, in the minority (Trotsky was the Central Committee member closest to his views on this) insisted that there was: “The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands . . . The majority gained in the Soviets of the metropolitan cities resulted from the people coming over to our side . . . Compare the elections to the city councils of Petrograd and Moscow with the elections to the Soviets. Compare the elections in Moscow with the Moscow strike of August 12. Those are objective facts regarding that majority of revolutionary elements that are leading the people.”83 For Lenin, again, elections were an invaluable tool for calculating the probability of success for the most important election, the masses voting with their feet—their willingness and ability to not only take power but defend it. Note the qualifier, the “majority of revolutionary elements that are leading the people”—those he regarded to be the most effective voters with their feet.

It’s useful to recall his point made in 1913 about the elections to the Fourth Duma, because they, too, supplied “objective data . . . The struggle of parties—in practice, before the electorate, and with the returns summed up—invariably furnishes data serving to test our conception of the balance of the social forces in the country and of the significance of particular ‘slogans.’” He reiterated this point about the value of elections five months after the October Revolution in the context of a debate about the prospects for a Bolshevik-like revolution in Germany: “As matters stood in October, we had made a precise calculation of the mass forces. We not only thought, we knew with certainty, from the experience of the mass elections to the Soviets, that the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers had already come over to our side in September and in early October. We knew . . . that the coalition [government] had also lost the support of the peasantry—and that meant that our cause had already won.”84

The Socialist Revolutionary-Menshevik leadership of the executive of the soviet convened in mid-September the “Democratic Conference,” which was basically an attempt to divert the energy boiling from below and increasingly led by the Bolsheviks into the parliamentary arena. Lenin urged the party’s leadership not to be enticed: “It would be a big mistake, sheer parliamentary cretinism on our part, if we were to regard the Democratic Conference as a parliament; for even if it were to proclaim itself a permanent and sovereign parliament of the revolution, it would nevertheless decide nothing. The power of decision lies outside it in the working-class quarters of Petrograd and Moscow.”85 Consistent with all the lessons Marx and Engels had drawn about 1848 and the experiences of Russia’s own revolution, Lenin explained in anticipation of Russia’s future “civil war” and its outcome why what was “outside” the electoral and parliamentary arenas was more important: “A comparison of the data on the ‘parliamentary’ [local duma] elections and the data on the . . . mass movements [since April 20] fully corroborates, in respect of Russia, an observation often made in the West, namely, that the revolutionary proletariat is incomparably stronger in the extra-parliamentary than in the parliamentary struggle, as far as influencing the masses and drawing them into the struggle is concerned.”86 When Lenin decided that the Bolsheviks should boycott the conference, he drew on “the elements that went into shaping the correct tactics of boycotting the Bulygin Duma” in 1905 and the “incorrect” ones of “boycotting the Third Duma” in 1907.87

After delays and postponements, the provisional government finally set a date for elections to the Constituent Assembly: November 12. Having insisted for months that they be held, the Bolsheviks immediately made preparations to take part. Ever vigilant about a proletarian approach to the electoral process, however, Lenin criticized the composition of the list the Central Committee put together. There were two problems. First, more workers, “four or five times more,” needed to be included, because in what would be an overwhelmingly “peasant Constituent Assembly . . . they alone are capable of establishing close and intimate ties with the peasant deputies.” The second and related problem had to do with the political histories of many on the list: “It is absolutely inadmissible also to have an excessive number of candidates from among people who have but recently joined our Party and have not yet been tested . . . In filling the list with such candidates who should first have worked in the Party for months and months, the C.C. has thrown wide open the door for careerists who scramble for seats in the Constituent Assembly.”

Lenin immediately made clear his intentions: “It goes without saying that from among the mezhraiontsi [members of the Inter-District Organization, the party that Trotsky had belonged to from 1913] who have been hardly tested in proletarian work in our Party’s spirit, no one would contest the candidature of, say, Trotsky, for, first, upon his arrival, Trotsky at once took up an internationalist stand; second, he worked among the mezhraiontsi for a merger; third, in the difficult July days he proved himself equal to the task and a loyal supporter of the party of the revolutionary proletariat. Clearly, as much cannot be said about many of the new Party members entered on the list.” About one of the latter, he said it would have been fine to include him if, like Trotsky, he had displayed “a desire to reform” his previous views. “But to get him into the Constituent Assembly within a week or so of his entry into the Party is in fact to transform the Party into the same kind of dirty stall for careerists as most of the European parties are.”

Going into the Constituent Assembly required conscious party direction: “The serious work in the Constituent Assembly will consist in establishing close, intimate ties with the peasants. Only workers who are in touch with peasant life are fit for this. To pack the Constituent Assembly with orators and writers is to take the beaten track of opportunism and chauvinism.”88 Just as he had devoted innumerable hours to providing direction to the RSDLP deputies in the four State Dumas for forging the worker-peasant alliance as well as other tasks, Lenin envisioned Bolshevik participation in the Constituent Assembly for doing the same. No other party member had thought as long and hard about realizing this goal via the parliamentary arena nor had the experience for doing so.

That Trotsky was already on the list and that Lenin endorsed him in the way he did is especially instructive about the internal norms of the Bolsheviks. It was at the aforementioned semiclandestine Sixth Congress of the party at the end of July that Trotsky was not only formally admitted to the Bolshevik party but voted onto its Central Committee, while he was in jail and Lenin in hiding. The vote tally itself is revealing. The top four vote getters in descending order were Lenin, 133 of 134; Zinoviev, 132; Kamenev, 131; and Trotsky, 131. Despite a more than decadelong bitter dispute between him and Lenin and other Bolsheviks, all that, again, was now water under the bridge. Indicative of what happened to the Bolshevik party after Lenin was dead is that Trotsky’s name continued to be omitted in the Lenin Collected Works in the list of those elected to the Central Committee. And only in the fifth Russian edition did Lenin’s endorsement of him appear for the first time.89

The relative ease with which the revolution was carried out on October 25, marked by the absence of any real defense of the provisional government and thus minimum bloodshed, especially in Petrograd, offers convincing evidence that Lenin was indeed right that the effective majority of the population—those willing to vote with their feet—would support the insurrection. And nothing was as important in his calculus as the results of the various elections that preceded it.

Five years before October, Lenin came across letters Marx wrote, in the heat of the Paris Commune uprising, to a one-time acquaintance who charged that the insurgents were mistaken to have gone into revolt. To appreciate Marx’s response, know that six months prior to the insurgency he counseled the Paris working class against doing just that; they lacked a leadership and sufficient allies to be victorious. But did Marx, Lenin asked, rain on the revolt once it began? “No. On April 12, 1871, Marx writes an enthusiastic letter to [Ludwig] Kugelmann—a letter which we would like to see hung in the home of every Russian Social-Democrat and of every literate Russian worker . . . when he saw the mass movement of the people, he watched it with the keen attention of a participant in great events marking a step forward in the historic revolutionary movement . . . The historical initiative of the masses was what Marx prized above everything else . . . Marx knew how to warn the leaders against a premature rising. But his attitude towards the heaven-storming proletariat was that of a practical adviser, of a participant in the struggle of the masses, who were raising the whole movement to a higher level in spite of the false theories and mistakes of [Louis] Blanqui and [Joseph] Proudhon.”

Lenin then turned to Marx’s critique of Kuglemann’s “doubts” about the Communards, “referring to the hopelessness of the struggle and to realism as opposed to romanticism”: “Marx immediately (April 17, 1871) severely lectured Kugelmann. ‘World history,’ he wrote, ‘would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favorable chances [Lenin’s italics].’ He realized that to attempt in advance to calculate the chances with complete accuracy would be quackery or hopeless pedantry. What he valued above everything else was that the working class heroically and self-sacrificingly took the initiative in making world history. Marx regarded world history from the standpoint of those who make it without being in a position to calculate the chances infallibly beforehand, and not from the standpoint of an intellectual philistine who moralizes: ‘It was easy to foresee . . . they should not have taken up’ . . . Marx was also able to appreciate that there are moments in history when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for the next struggle.”90 Nothing presaged Lenin’s course in fall 1917 as did these lines.

After October

Among Lenin’s many tasks as leader of the new Russian state was the distillation of the lessons of the revolution. The newly founded Communist International, Comintern, or Third International, was just the venue for their discussion and dissemination. Not the least important of those lessons was how the Bolsheviks utilized the electoral and parliamentary arenas to take power. Two documents proved to be his definitive and final pronouncements on the topic. What happened to those lessons was inextricably linked to the fate of the revolution that unfolded within a few years of his death.

In Defense of Revolutionary Parliamentarism

The central debate in 1917 about which form of representative democracy would prevail, soviet or parliamentary democracy—a proxy for the more fundamental issue, which class would rule Russia—was settled in January 1918. The day after the Bolshevik-led insurrection, the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, where the Bolsheviks had a majority, took ownership of what had been done in its name. The era of soviet governance, commencing with a coalition of the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, had begun. As Lenin had always said, only with the workers and peasants in power would the convening of the Constituent Assembly be ensured. Elections for it finally began on November 12.91 The Socialist Revolutionaries garnered the largest number of votes in the country as a whole while in Petrograd and environs the Bolsheviks were the clear winner. Lenin argued that because the Socialist Revolutionary lists were drawn up before the party split into a right and left wing the votes they got did not reflect actual popular will. The situation could only be rectified if voters had the right to recall elected deputies whose politics they disagreed with. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets issued such a decree, setting the stage for the inevitable clash over which was the supreme political authority in Russia, the soviets or the Constituent Assembly. When the latter convened on January 5, the committee demanded that it recognize the hegemony of the soviets. Its failure to do so prompted Lenin the next day to call for its dissolution, which is exactly what the committee voted to do and what in fact occurred.

When Kerensky and Kornilov threatened to end soviet power in July and August of 1917, workers and peasants came to its defense, the prelude, in hindsight, to the October Revolution. But when soviet power threatened the just-born Constituent Assembly, no comparable class force voted with its feet to be its savior. Its brief moment in the sun ended unceremoniously on January 6. The difference speaks volumes about which of the two institutions of representative democracy enjoyed effective majority support. A similar point can be made about the outcome of the civil war that got under way soon afterward. Lenin, as noted already, anticipated such a conflagration and correctly predicted, based on the election data, the eventual defeat of the counterrevolution. Once soviet power was in place after October, he could be even more confident about his forecast. Because one of its first acts was to fulfill the Bolshevik pledge to grant land to poor peasants, it ensured support for soviet governance from Russia’s largest constituency. Exactly because it was soviet power and not the long-delayed Constituent Assembly that made the decree is why the peasantry came to its defense in the most critical moment in the young revolution’s existence and ensured its victory in the civil war.92

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly required Lenin to defend soviet governance against critics such as Kautsky. His speech to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on January 6 that called for its demise went to the heart of his argument: “The Soviets, created solely by the initiative of the people, are a form of democracy without parallel in any other country of the world . . . At one time, we considered the Constituent Assembly to be better than tsarism and the republic of Kerensky with their famous organs of power; but as the Soviets emerged, they, being revolutionary organizations of the whole people, naturally became incomparably superior to any parliament in the world, a fact that I emphasized,” referring to his April Theses, “as far back as last April.”93 And later, in one of the best succinct distillations of the Marxist view of the alternative to the soviets, bourgeois democracy, he said, “No bourgeois republic, however democratic, ever was or could have been anything but a machine for the suppression of the working people by capital, an instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the political rule of capital. The democratic bourgeois republic promised and proclaimed majority rule, but it could never put this into effect as long as private ownership of the land and other means of production existed.”94 He provided his Exhibit A: “One of the most democratic republics in the world is the United States of America, yet nowhere (and those who have been there since 1905 probably know it) is the power of capital, the power of a handful of multimillionaires over the whole of society, so crude and so openly corrupt as in America. Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society, and no democratic republic, no franchise can change its nature.”95

A related issue that had to be addressed concerned the decision of the new soviet government to disenfranchise the bourgeoisie, which for Lenin was “not a necessary and indispensable feature of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”96 It had to do with the “specific conditions of the Russian revolution and the specific path of its development.”97 Doing so “does not mean . . . that a definite category of citizens are disfranchised for life. It applies, only to the exploiters, to those who, in violation of the fundamental laws of the socialist Soviet Republic, persist in their efforts to cling to their exploiters’ status and to preserve capitalist relations . . . [I]n the very near future, the cessation of foreign invasion and the completion of the expropriation of the expropriators may, under certain circumstances, create a situation where the proletarian state will choose other methods of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters and will introduce unrestricted universal suffrage.”98 “We do not propose,” for that reason, “our Constitution as a model for other countries.”99 The civil war, along with the other Russian realities, required such measures—not unlike those that Lincoln employed in the American Civil War.

While defending disenfranchisement of Russia’s bourgeoisie—“barely two or three percent of the population”100—Lenin urged greater participation of women in the political process: “It is essential that women workers take a greater part in the elections. The Soviet government was the first and only government in the world to abolish completely all the old, bourgeois, infamous laws which placed women in an inferior position compared with men and which granted privileges to men . . . Therefore, elect more women workers, both Communist and non-Party, to the Soviet. If she is only an honest woman worker who is capable of managing work sensibly and conscientiously, it makes no difference if she is not a member of the Party—elect her to the Moscow Soviet.”101

Last, the rationale for soviet governance needed to be spelled out for the first time in the party’s program. The first two of the seven reasons he proposed embody their essence:

The more direct influence of the working masses on state structure and administration—i.e., a higher form of democracy—is also effected under the Soviet type of state, first, by the electoral procedure and the possibility of holding elections more frequently, and also by conditions for re-election and for the recall of deputies which are simpler and more comprehensible to the urban and rural workers than is the case under the best forms of bourgeois democracy . . . secondly, by making the economic, industrial unit (factory) and not a territorial division the primary electoral unit and the nucleus of the state structure under Soviet power.102

When detailed figures for the elections to the Constituent Assembly became available a year later, Lenin’s penchant for number crunching kicked into high gear. The data, he argued, explained not only why the Bolsheviks were able to take power in October but why they were winning the civil war at the end of 1919. Even Lenin’s opponents grudgingly admit to the objectivity and validity of his analysis.103 The essence of his claim in “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was that by September 1917 his party had won to its side the majority of Russia’s most efficacious voters—those willing to vote with their feet. The Bolsheviks then used that state power to win over the majority of Russia’s peasants by decreeing land to them. And therein was a lesson applicable as well to advanced capitalist countries:

[T]he proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side. But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers. In order to win the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must, in the first place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power; secondly, it must introduce Soviet power and completely smash the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the rule, prestige and influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the non-proletarian working people. Thirdly, it must entirely destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the majority of the non-proletarian masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary way at the expense of the exploiters.104

The fallacy of Kautsky et al., Lenin argued, was to “imagine that extremely important political problems can be solved by voting. Such problems are actually solved by civil war if they are acute and aggravated by struggle.” To appreciate his point, think about the American Civil War. Neither the country’s constitution nor presidential election of 1860 could resolve its “extremely important political problem”—its equivalent to Russia’s long festering sore. Only a conflagration of biblical proportions was able to put an end to chattel slavery. In the midst of the carnage of the First World War and in language reminiscent of the most memorable sentence in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Lenin wrote that “too much still remains in the world that must be destroyed with fire and sword for the emancipation of the working class.”105

The last section of the article lists in thesis-like fashion ten points that summarized his argument (see Appendix H). “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” proved to be Lenin’s penultimate declaration on the revolutionary employment of the electoral and parliamentary arenas, a summary and generalization of the Russian experience.

In defending soviet power, Lenin made absolutely clear what he didn’t intend, as he told delegates to the party’s Seventh party congress in 1918: “[W]e ought not in any way to give the impression that we attach absolutely no value to parliamentary institutions. They are a huge advance on what preceded them.”106 The third of his ten “theses” in the “Constituent Assembly Elections” article, in fact, underscored his point. In his better-known pamphlet, written four months later in 1920, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin made his most forceful case for participating in the parliamentary arena. The context was the growing attractiveness of the Bolshevik Revolution for aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere in the world, particularly those affiliated with the new Communist or Third International. Clarity on why and how the Bolsheviks took power was essential for any who wanted to emulate their Russian comrades. An emerging problem was the tendency to see the October insurrection as the magic bullet. His pamphlet—along with correspondence to revolutionaries such as Sylvia Pankhurst in Great Britain—and the Bolshevik intervention in the Second Congress of the International in 1920 sought to correct such a narrow reading of the Russian Revolution.107

Lenin began with his all-important and too neglected qualification of the historical place of the Russian Revolution. Now it was on center stage, but “soon after the victory of the proletarian revolution in at least one of the advanced countries, a sharp change will probably come about: Russia will cease to be the model and will once again become a backward country (in the ‘Soviet’ and the socialist sense).”108 Then came his main point based on the actual Bolshevik experience: “The alternation of parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle, of the tactics of boycotting parliament and that of participating in parliament, of legal and illegal forms of struggle, and likewise their interrelations and connections—all this was marked by an extraordinary wealth of content.”109 After a brief description of the party’s decadelong Duma experience, he distilled its significance:

Today, when we look back at this fully completed historical period, whose connection with subsequent periods has now become quite clear, it becomes most obvious that in 1908–14 the Bolsheviks could not have preserved (let alone strengthened and developed) the core of the revolutionary party of the proletariat, had they not upheld, in a most strenuous struggle, the viewpoint that it was obligatory to combine legal and illegal forms of struggle, and that it was obligatory to participate even in a most reactionary parliament and in a number of other institutions hemmed in by reactionary laws (sick benefit societies, etc.).110

The “strenuous struggle” referred to the recurring debate on whether to boycott or participate in the Dumas. If the boycott of the Bulygin Duma in 1905 was correct, that “of the Duma in 1906 was a mistake although a minor and easily remediable one”—his first admission in print of the error and what the circumstantial evidence at the time suggested.

The Russian experience challenged those voices in the Third International who justified nonparticipation in parliaments, especially when they became centers for organizing the counterrevolution: “We Bolsheviks participated in the most counterrevolutionary parliaments, and experience has shown that this participation was not only useful but indispensable to the party of the revolutionary proletariat, after the first bourgeois revolution in Russia (1905), so as to pave the way for the second bourgeois revolution (February 1917), and then for the socialist revolution (October 1917).”111 The word “indispensable” is itself indispensable for one of the arguments of this book—namely, that Lenin’s electoral/parliamentary strategy goes a long way in explaining Bolshevik success in 1917.

As for the claim of some would-be revolutionaries that parliaments had now become “obsolete,” Lenin responded, yes and no. The Paris Commune and the Russian experience did indeed show that a new era of representative democracy had opened. But both were only at the beginning of a historical development that could only be “counted in decades.” In the meantime, and as long as the dictatorship of capital was in place, the “Lefts” would have to participate in them. It was true, he admitted, that it “is far more difficult to create a really revolutionary parliamentary group in a European parliament than it was in Russia. That stands to reason. But it is only a particular expression of the general truth that it was easy for Russia, in the specific and historically unique situation of 1917, to start the socialist revolution, but it will be more difficult for Russia than for the European countries to continue the revolution and bring it to its consummation.”112 Yes, he could “assure foreign communists” that doing parliamentary work in Russia was “quite unlike the usual West European parliamentary campaigns. From this the conclusion is often drawn: ‘Well, that was in Russia, in our country parliamentarianism is different.’ This is a false conclusion. Communists, adherents of the Third International in all countries, exist for the purpose of changing—all along the line, in all spheres of life—the old socialist, trade unionist, syndicalist, and parliamentary type of work into a new type of work, the communist.”113 In the debate at the Second Congress of the International, Lenin reminded delegates that though it was brief, Russia, too, after the February Revolution, experienced bourgeois democracy that the Bolsheviks had to figure out how to negotiate.114

Finally, there was another advantage in doing parliamentary work. Because, as the Russian experience showed, “in conditions in which it is often necessary to hide ‘leaders’ underground, the evolution of good ‘leaders,’ reliable, tested and authoritative, is a very difficult matter; these difficulties cannot be successfully overcome without combining legal and illegal work, and without testing the ‘leaders,’ among other ways, in parliaments.” The problem with “bad leaders,” such as in Germany, wasn’t the parliamentary arena itself but “those leaders who are unable—and still more against those who are unwilling—to utilize parliamentary elections and the parliamentary rostrum in a revolutionary and communist manner.”115 It could be easier, in other words, being a communist doing “illegal work” but harder in the “legal” or parliamentary arena imbued with its daily temptations to compromise revolutionary politics. Combining the two areas of work would therefore be the best laboratory for communist training.

Left-Wing Communism unambiguously confirms that Lenin intended his electoral/parliamentary strategy for any country where the working class had political weight. Written two and a half years before he succumbed to his last and incapacitating stroke—its 82 pages being far longer than anything he wrote afterward—it constitutes, along with “The Constituent Assembly Elections,” Lenin’s final and definitive treatment of the topic. At the Second Congress of the Third International in 1920, “Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism,” drafted by Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Zinoviev, were adopted (see Appendix I). They were essentially an elaboration of Lenin’s “The Constituent Assembly Elections” article and arguments in Left-Wing Communism. Among the 21 conditions for membership in Comintern that delegates to the Second Congress adopted, a debate and discussion in which he actively participated, was number 11. With the betrayals of the Second International in mind when the Guns of August exploded in 1914, it required affiliates to remove from “their parliamentary fractions . . . unreliable elements” and ensure that fraction members were subordinate to party executive committees “not just in words but in deeds” and demand that each “subordinate all of his activity in the interests of truly revolutionary propaganda and agitation.”116

Leninism after Lenin

Aspiring revolutionaries affiliated with the Third International took Lenin’s counsel to heart. Years later the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács remembered his youthful communism, a kind of “messianic sectarianism . . . My polemical essay attacking the idea of participation in bourgeois parliaments is a good example of this tendency. Its fate—criticism at the hands of Lenin—enabled me to take my first step away from sectarianism. Lenin pointed to the vital distinction, indeed to the paradox, that an institution may be obsolete from the standpoint of world history—as, e.g. the soviets had rendered parliaments obsolete—but that this need not preclude participation in it for tactical reasons; on the contrary.”117 But with Lenin gone—and later mummified—such advice would no longer be readily available.

The failure of revolutionaries elsewhere to do what the Bolsheviks had done, despite Lenin’s best efforts, to lead their working classes to political power goes a long way in explaining the outcome of the Russian Revolution and, hence, Lenin’s legacy. Marx and Engels at the end of their lives and Lenin as early as 1905 made clear that the consummation of a socialist revolution in Russia depended on it spreading to one of the advanced capitalist countries in Europe. For a moment it appeared that the Germans might duplicate what the Bolsheviks did. But the mistakes of the new communist party and the counterrevolutionary actions of social democracy made that impossible. The increasing isolation of the Russian Revolution, combined with the devastating toll of the civil war, became a breeding ground for the bureaucratic counterrevolution Stalin would soon lead. In his final months, Lenin realized what was happening— “a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions” is how he described the Soviet Union—and waged from his sick bed an eventually unsuccessful fight to halt that development.118 Political and historical contingency, in other words, rather than some notion of a democratic deficit in Lenin, best explain the Stalinist counterrevolution.119 Nothing in Lenin’s program and practice prior to those contingencies could have predicted such an outcome. This book has by now, hopefully, amply and convincingly documented Lenin’s profoundly democratic credentials. Certainly no one in Russia could rival him in this regard. Like Marx and Engels, he deeply understood that to be a democrat one had to be a revolutionary.

For this book there is no better evidence of the Stalinist counterrevolution that had taken place than the policy that Moscow imposed on the affiliates of the Third International at its Seventh Congress in 1935. In the name of fighting fascism, “Communists . . . must strive to secure joint action with the Social-Democratic Parties, reformist trade unions and other organizations of the toilers against the class enemies of the proletariat, on the basis of short or long-term agreements.” For the electoral arena it meant that “the Communists must seek to establish a united front with the Social-Democratic Parties and the trade unions . . . and exert every effort to prevent the election of reactionary and fascist candidates. In face of fascist danger, the Communist may . . . participate in election campaigns on a common platform and with a common ticket of the anti-fascist front [all italics in original].”120

If this sounds familiar to readers of this book, it should be. This was essentially the line that Lenin combatted in more than one Duma election. Mensheviks incessantly advocated support to the Cadets as the “lesser evil” in order, according to them, to prevent the election of the Black Hundreds—the fascist equivalent. Lenin vehemently disagreed and always fought, like Marx and Engels, for independent working-class political action despite the “Black Hundred scare.” That the Seventh was the last Third International Congress is no coincidence. To convince bourgeois heads of state like Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the communists in his country were no longer a threat because of the new Popular Front policy, Stalin unilaterally pulled the plug on what had already been by then a comatose organization. For would-be revolutionaries who looked to Moscow for guidance, the vast majority in that era, Lenin’s real electoral/parliamentary strategy would never be made available for them. Only the relatively small number of those who looked to Trotsky for leadership learned differently.

It fell to Trotsky to defend and fight for Lenin’s real program. No one had better credentials. Once a bitter opponent of Lenin, the person who launched the Lenin-as-Jacobin charge, Trotsky embraced him in 1917 to ensure Bolshevik success and later died at the hands of one of Stalin’s assassins in 1940 for leading the struggle against the counterrevolution. No better perspective exists on what the Soviet experiment sought to achieve than the final comments in his History of the Russian Revolution, written two decades after the Bolshevik triumph in October 1917:

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces—in nature, in society, in man himself. Critical and creative thought can boast of its greatest victories up to now in the struggle with nature. The physico-chemical sciences have already reached a point where man is clearly about to become master of matter. But social relations are still forming in the manner of the coral islands. Parliamentarism illumined only the surface of society, and even that with a rather artificial light. In comparison with monarchy and other heirlooms from the cannibals and cave-dwellers, democracy is of course a great conquest, but it leaves the blind play of forces in the social relations of men untouched. It was against this deeper-sphere of the unconscious that the October revolution was the first to raise its hand. The Soviet system wishes to bring aim and plan into the very basis of society, where up to now only accumulated consequences have reigned.121

Unless it’s assumed that the present examples of representative democracy—including the US Congress—constitute humanity’s last word on the subject, then the Bolsheviks should be applauded for at least having tried to do better.122 Lenin deserves the last word, because his insight about the reality of bourgeois democracy, made in 1908, is so nakedly instantiated today by the ways in which the ruling classes, employing the legislative process, seek to resolve the present capitalist crisis—on the backs of working people. “Parliamentarism does not eliminate, but lays bare the innate character even of the most democratic bourgeois republics as organs of class oppression.”