Marxist ideas penetrated and spread in Tsarist Russia much sooner than they ever did in Britain, where the Communist Manifesto was first published and where Capital was composed in its entirety. The impact was much greater in St Petersburg and Moscow than in London or Manchester. A few decades later, Lenin would confront this contradiction between theory and practice and provide the political–theoretical basis for transcending it on a global scale. He argued that the development of capitalism and its degenerate extension, imperialism, had destroyed all the progressive capacities it had displayed in its youth during the battles against absolutist feudalism. It was now an oppressor, subjugating the world in its own narrow interests:
The first epoch from the great French revolution to the Franco-Prussian war is one of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of its triumph, of the bourgeoisie on the upgrade, an epoch of bourgeois–democratic movements in general and of bourgeois–national movements in particular, an epoch of the rapid breakdown of the obsolete feudal–absolutist institution. The second epoch is that of the full domination and decline of the bourgeoisie, one of transition from its progressive character towards reactionary and even ultra-reactionary finance capital.1
The third epoch that had set in was, he argued, a crucial one because it ‘places the bourgeoisie in the same “position” as that in which the feudal lords found themselves during the first epoch. This is the epoch of imperialism and imperialist upheavals’; the logic for him was now obvious. An all-out battle between the global oppression of capital and its victims with tactics developed according to location and need.
Lenin’s contention that the chain breaks at its weakest link first was proved correct but the other capitalist links in Western Europe and the United States (and later in Asia and South America) welded themselves back together, survived and grew stronger. The weakest link of the capitalist chain, during his lifetime, turned out to be the most backward imperial state in Europe, Tsarist Russia; the strongest, its most advanced industrialized counterpart, Britain. Germany lay somewhere in between. Marx’s writings did not offer too much hope to the small, if growing, industrial proletariat in Russia. He had virtually declared a revolution in Russia to be theoretically impossible. Later, he did mention in passing the possibility of the Russian peasant commune serving as a red base, but these were essentially throwaway lines designed not to discourage his Russian followers too much.
The February Revolution that toppled the Tsar in 1917 took Lenin and all the exiled revolutionaries by surprise. The idea of approaching the Germans for a special train back home came from the Left–Menshevik leader, Julius Martov, and even though he refused to board it till the representative council (the Soviet) in Petrograd approved the decision, the others were less fussy. It was vital they got back as soon as possible. Accepting opportunist German help was not too big a deal since a revolution was bound to break out in that country as well. Kaiser Wilhelm argued the opposite. Help them if we must if it shortens the war, he told his senior civil servants, but once we take Russia we’ll destroy these Bolsheviks like vermin. The Bolsheviks were banking on a German revolution to take care of that problem.
They had, after all, opposed the barbarism of the First World War. Lenin, isolated yet again at the Zimmerwald anti-war conference in 1917, had insisted the only credible goal was to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. The enemy was at home. Another manifestation of Jacobin voluntarism, his opponents had mocked. Will this fellow never learn? But this fellow was being vindicated by history, whose pace had been quickened by the war. Even Lenin had not imagined that the war would disintegrate the Tsarist Empire at such a speed. It was not a workers’ uprising, but (even more than in 1905 after the defeat inflicted by the Japanese) the growing realization that the war, as far as Russia was concerned, could not be won. Desertions, food shortages, the use of the uniformed peasants as cannon fodder were all beginning to divide the Tsarist armies. The peasants in uniform killing and being killed on the battlefields of the First World War were being radicalized.
The three texts by Lenin were written between the outbreak of the revolution in February 1917 and its completion in November that same year. Alexander Herzen had insisted the ‘dialectic was the algebra of revolution’. It was a clunky phrase but accurate. What was the way out of the contradiction? How could it be resolved? Lenin became obsessed with these questions. His answer was to stress the primacy of politics, of revolutionary strategy and tactics, above economics and sociology. All these ideas had taken shape in What Is to Be Done?, his pamphlet of 1902, which a year later permanently divided the Russian Social Democratic Party. Spontaneity, argued Lenin, would never be enough. Trade-unionism, by its very nature, was addicted to the status quo. Its dialectic of partial conquests—if we ask for more we might lose what we have already won—made it a defensive, conservative and insufficient force. In any case, the Russian proletariat was too small and too weak economically and socially to spark off a revolution on its own. The peasantry was not an undifferentiated and inert mass. It represented the majority of the population and had to be won over, encouraged to break the chains of its oppression and united with other forces to assault the citadels of Tsarist power. Radical politics required a radical instrument: a revolutionary political party. These ideas led to the usual charges of sectarianism, utopianism, voluntarism, Jacobinism.
Since the outbreak of the revolution, Lenin had diverted his own activities. No more lectures. No more café discussions. His main task, he told Alexandra Kollontai, was composing a daily essay for Pravda now that it was legal. The press had become a crucial conveyor belt. In his first ‘Letter from Afar’ he explained to Russian readers from Zurich why what had happened was no ‘miracle’ as conservative leaders were suggesting, but the beginning of a new epoch, one of wars and revolutions:
The first revolution engendered by the imperialist world war has broken out. The first revolution, but certainly not the last. Judging by the scanty information available in Switzerland … The first stage of our revolution will certainly not be the last … There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that appears miraculous … The combination of a number of factors of world historic importance was required for the tsarist monarchy to have collapsed in a few days … the all-powerful ‘stage manager’, this mighty accelerator, was the imperialist world war.
On the sealed train taking the exiles back to Russia, Lenin was buried in deep thought. Eyewitness reports agree he did not speak much, and even his habitual jottings were greatly reduced. He was thinking of the possibilities that now lay before the clandestine party he had painstakingly constructed over the past two decades. Its cadres, full-time revolutionaries in the main, would be the only force prepared to push the revolution forward. The internal party was now legal, its newspaper was being published and read by thousands, its leaders had been released and were awaiting him in Petrograd. Peasant consciousness was being altered by the war, and its impact in the Russian countryside was disastrous. His thoughts kept going back to Marx’s writings on the state and its apparatuses. He knew well the essays—The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France—in which the founding father of the movement had written of the need to confront the old state and create a new one: the commune–state.
By the time trains had been changed at Stockholm and Bolsheviks had joined Lenin’s group, providing first-hand reports of what was actually going on, when they were on track to reach the Finland station in Petrograd, Lenin was much clearer in his conception of the revolution. His younger colleague Nikolai Bukharin had already come up with the slogan ‘Smash the Bourgeois State’, and Lenin pondered adopting it. But it was Marx’s text that finally persuaded him. The political model was the Paris Commune, and backward Russia had produced the organs of direct democracy in the shape of the soviets. These should form the basis of alternative state structures on every level. The commune–state was the only possible replacement for the bourgeois state and the degenerate Tsarist monstrosity in Russia. For Lenin these were practical ideas, far removed from utopianism, and would be a much better gauge of mass consciousness and more democratic than any existing bourgeois assembly. All this would find its way to one of his most important texts, The State and Revolution.
He was working non-stop on a draft of something entitled ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’ that would become known as ‘The April Theses’ and leave its mark on the twentieth century. Prior to Lenin no revolutionary leader or party had decided consciously on the road down which they were going to travel. Neither radicals to the left of Cromwell nor Robespierre and St Just had a map for the future. Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti and his black Jacobins wanted to abolish slavery and then wait and see. The Mexican leaders of the peasantry, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, did destroy the hacienda oligarchy but were outwitted and outmanoeuvred by gringos and a progringo elite with disastrous consequences for the country. The demands of the Chinese leaders of the Boxer Rebellion were limited to sovereignty and Sun Yat-sen’s republic was a brave, but doomed attempt to create a bourgeois democracy on the Western model.
In the first letters from Zurich he had more or less avoided the question. Was the February eruption a bourgeois democratic upheaval like the 1789 revolution in France? If, as Marxist orthodoxy and most of the present leaders of Russian social democracy insisted, the productive forces were seriously underdeveloped as they patently were in Russia, how long before they could make a socialist revolution? The theoreticians of German social democracy had been firm on this point; they had wanted their own ‘tried and trusted methods’ to be the model for all social-democratic parties. First build electoral strength via parliament, then obtain a majority and finally strike the enemy. But what of the enemy within the labour movement that had wreaked havoc in Germany, France, Britain and many smaller European states? Lenin had greatly respected Karl Kautsky, but once the German party, with honourable exceptions, had decided to back the imperialist world war and voted for war credits, all reverence was immediately discarded. This factor, often underestimated, played an extremely important part in Lenin’s calculations. Relieved of the need to take the German party’s advice seriously, he began to think afresh on what was to be done in Russia. What was the point of a bourgeois democratic revolution if all it did was retain power for the post-Tsarist oppressors, continue the war and ignore peasant and proletarian needs and demands? Perhaps what was needed was a combined revolution that pushed through all democratic demands as a prelude to something much more radical: a socialist revolution. Liberated Russia as a launch pad for the German revolution and others that would mark the beginning of the end for imperialism and its oppressed multi-continental colonies. He played with the idea of a ‘revolutionary–democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasants’ in opposition to the dictatorship of capital that ruled the imperialist countries but doubted whether this platypus could be brought into being.
After the dress rehearsal of 1905, Lenin had criticized the arguments advanced by a group of socialists led by Trotsky. They believed, Lenin riposted, ‘that a Socialist (i.e. proletarian) revolution was possible, as if the productive forces of the country were sufficiently developed for such a revolution to take place’. Now, with the curtain up on the actual revolution, Lenin found himself moving in the same direction. ‘The April Theses’ shook the Bolshevik party to its core. Lenin had been raging against the latest issues of Pravda in which Kamenev and Stalin were expressing critical support for the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. The Bolshevik leader demanded a clean break via a slogan that insisted on the removal of all the capitalist ministers. A demand whose popularity grew as the war continued and the government proved itself incapable on every front. Both in the Soviet where the Right had a majority and in government, the moderates were paralysed: ‘dual powerlessness’ was Trotsky’s witty description of the existing state of affairs.
There was a huge crowd waiting for Lenin at the Finland station, including officials from the Soviet. He spoke above their heads to those others who had also assembled to greet him, to those soldiers, workers, students and a sprinkling of intellectuals, attached and detached, who had made February possible. But before he could speak, Cheikdze, the official leader of the delegation despatched by the Petrograd Soviet, issued a welcome and a warning:
Comrade Lenin … we welcome you to Russia. But—we think that the principal task of the revolutionary democracy is now the defence of the revolution from any encroachments either from within or from without. We consider that what this goal requires is not disunion, but the closing of the democratic ranks. We hope you will pursue these goals together with us.
Lenin was not in a mood for any of this and virtually ignored this delegation. He was impatient to speak, stood there as though nothing taking place had the slightest connection with him and then, turning away from the official delegation altogether, he made this ‘reply’:
Dear Comrades, soldiers, sailors, and workers! I am happy to greet in your persons the victorious Russian revolution, and greet you as the vanguard of the worldwide proletarian army … The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe … The hour is not far distant when at the call of our comrade, Karl Liebknecht [who was still alive at the time], the peoples will turn their arms against their own capitalist exploiters … The worldwide Socialist revolution has already dawned … Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash. The Russian revolution accomplished by you has prepared the way and opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide Socialist revolution!
His words were uncompromising, but he had thought about them for several weeks. They reflected the ten theses that would be made public on 7 April 1917. Their reception was a mixture of bewilderment and shock on the part of quite a few Bolshevik leaders and, naturally, all other parties of the Left. The style of the theses was that of a machine gun burst, followed by a staccato drum roll. The last thesis made it clear that the battleground he had chosen was international: ‘Renovation of the International. Initiative, an International against social chauvinism, against the centre.’ It was Kautsky he had in mind and others too, who, despite pledges to the contrary at every international gathering of the Second International and universal agreement to deal with the impending imperialist war by a Europe-wide strike, had been unable to resist the tide of nationalist chauvinism. The capitulation was on a huge scale and split the workers’ movement for three-quarters of a century. Had they opposed the war the SPD leaders would undoubtedly have been imprisoned like Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades, but they would have survived the war intact and, perhaps, not surrendered to their own capitalist elite when the war ended and Germany became a republic. Might a German socialist revolution then have been more impressive and would more have been achieved than the isolated and isolating adventure of the Spartakusbund? And, if so, would not that event have led to a very different conclusion in Russia? Lenin was forever haunted by the scale of Kautsky’s betrayal and, in due course, a polemic emerged. The title, as was often the case with Lenin, left little room for ambiguity: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. He was the master of understanding the dialectic of friend/enemy.2 ‘The April Theses’ was his response to his old teachers in Germany. The workers and their allies had to struggle for power now and so it happened. Twelve years of struggle and defeats were compressed into a decisive day of action. Victory. In his ‘Notes in Defence of the April Theses’, Lenin stressed once again that the need was for a commune–state:
We must ably, carefully, clear people’s minds and lead the proletariat and poor peasants forward, away from ‘dual power’ towards the full power of the Soviets of Workers Deputies, and this is the commune in Marx’s sense, in the sense of the experience of 1871.
The ideas of Marx and revolutionary France never left him, despite the civil war and accompanied setbacks that lay ahead, and he returned to them as he lay paralysed for the last two years of his life.
London
May 2016