Mankind will yet be masters of the earth. The right of the people to make the laws—this produced the first great modern earthquake, whose latent shocks, even now, are heaving in the heart of the world. The right of the people to own the earth—this will produce the next. Train your hands, and your sons’ hands, gentlemen of the earth, for you and they will yet have to use them—JAMES FINTON LALOV
IN the remote hamlet of Kareika, amid the snowy wastes of the Siberian province of Yeniseisk, Stalin waited on events. Kareika stands on the banks of a river of the same name, and consisted at the time of fifteen peasant huts. Stalin had a room in one of these, and Sverdlov a room in another. The owner of Stalin’s hut lived with his family in another room and a kitchen. Fifty miles away there was a lead mine. One hundred and fifty miles in a westerly direction lay the prison colony of Turukhansk, where there were some 300 political prisoners. Both Turukhansk and Kareika were but specks in this vast tundra region of northern Asia. While fish abounded in the rivers and streams and the land was a huntsman’s paradise teaming with wild animal life, it was not a place an active political leader would choose for his residence.
Yet here was Joseph Stalin, a product of the semi-tropical Caucasus, condemned to stay nearly four winters amid the biting arctic winds, the ice and snow which monopolise eight to nine months of each year. The winter nights seemed almost interminable, a glimmer of daylight breaking the darkness for only an hour or two of the twenty-four. The monotony of this gloom was scarcely compensated by the summer months when the sun barely tipped the horizon before ascending again towards the zenith.
Now and then a peasant neighbour from the nearby huts would look in, and on rare occasions a few political prisoners would make a dash from the Turukhansk colony to talk things over with Stalin and Sverdlov. Vera Schweizer, a political exile in this colony, tells of a visit she and Suren Spandaryan made to Stalin at Kureika. She writes:
During that part of the year day and night merge into one endless Arctic night pierced with cruel frosts. We sped down the Yenisei by dog-sled without a stop, across the bleak wilderness that lies between Monastyrskoye and Kureika, a dash of 200 kilometres, pursued by the continuous howling of wolves. . . . Comrade Stalin was overjoyed at our unexpected arrival and did all he could to make the “Arctic travellers” comfortable. The first thing he did was to run to the Yenisei, where his fishing lines were set in holes through the ice. A few minutes later he returned with a huge sturgeon flung across his shoulder. Under the guidance of this “experienced fisherman” we quickly dressed the fish, extracted the caviar and prepared some fish-soup. And while these culinary activities were in progress, we kept up an earnest discussion of Party affairs. . . . In a corner was stacked fishing and hunting tackle of various kinds, which he himself had made. . . .
Thus the leader of revolution had adapted himself to the new environment and become expert hunter and fisherman, gathering energy and health that he would sorely need when the waiting days were done. The lines of contact with the world beyond the tundra were very attenuated. At long intervals letters would reach him from his friends the Alleluievs, with news of Lenin and the workmen of the Putilov in St. Petersburg and the oil fields of Baku. But there was no possibility of him directing any struggle from afar. Newspapers and certain books would reach him months after publication. Some people have queried, “Where are the theoretical works of Stalin in this period?” as if he had been deported to the Reading Rooms of the British Museum instead of a peasant’s but in the Arctic.
Nevertheless, Stalin and Sverdlov watched as best they could the onward-sweeping tide of events destined to end their exile once and for all. It was difficult to see so far ahead. But the Bolsheviks were certainly not taken by surprise when the war burst upon the world. Socialist leaders of every country had been warning mankind since the dawn of the twentieth century, of the coming conflagration. They were not too precise in this matter, however. They did not say who would fight whom. But they insisted that competitive capitalism, struggling fiercely for raw materials and markets, and incessantly piling up armaments, was carrying mankind towards world war.
This lack of precision in diagnosis had its corollary in the generalised character of the recommendations on what should be done by the working-class of the world to counter these developments, and thus accounts to some extent for the complete absence of organised preparations to prevent the outbreak of war. Since the formation of the International Socialist Bureau in 1889 each international Socialist conference had propounded certain principles which were to govern the actions of the Socialist working-class movement in every country. At each conference there had been a sharp division of opinion, and each resolution represented a compromise for the sake of retaining a certain formal unity. The clearest and most precise was the resolution passed at the Basle Conference of 1912. Thus, afterwards published as a manifesto, said,
If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working-classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the co-ordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favour of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule. . . .
The Congress records that the entire Socialist International is unanimous upon these principles of foreign policy. It calls upon the workers of all countries to oppose to capitalist imperialism the power of the international solidarity of the proletariat. It warns the ruling classes of all states not to increase by belligerent actions the misery of the masses brought on by the capitalist method of production. It emphatically demands peace. Let the Governments remember that with the present condition of Europe and the mood of the working-class, they cannot unleash a war without danger to themselves. Let them remember that the Franco-German War was followed by the revolutionary outbreak of the Commune, that the Russo-Japanese War set into motion the revolutionary energies of the peoples of the Russian Empire, that the competition in military and naval armaments gave the class conflicts in England and on the Continent an unheard-of sharpness, and unleashed an enormous wave of strikes. It would be insanity for the Governments not to realise that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working-class. The proletariat considers it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties. . . .
When the war actually broke upon the world in July and August 1914, the proletariat did not answer it with revolt. Nor did the Socialists. It burst the international Labour and Socialist movement apart. And only one party of the International, the Russian Bolshevik Party, took its stand on the revolutionary principles indicated in the manifesto of the Basle Conference. The trade unions of every country followed their respective governments. The Socialist and Labour Parties, with the exception of those which were pacifist and a few small groups, did likewise.
The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were completely isolated, for even among the dissidents there was confusion. But there was no ambiguity about the Bolshevik position. It is only necessary to state it to appreciate how remote it was from those taken up by other parties. It can be given in two phrases: “Transform the Imperialist War into Civil War”—“The enemy of the workers is the Government at home.” There was jubilation in the distant huts of Kareika and Turukhansk when Lenin’s resolution reached them. Stalin read it with deep satisfaction, for the master revolutionary had confirmed the views that Joseph had independently expressed to his fellow-exiles long before.
Twenty-five years later, standing in Lenin’s shoes, Stalin declared as the Second World War crashed upon Europe—“the resolution of 1914 holds good.”
The first declaration by Lenin and the half-dozen members of the Bolshevik Party in Geneva, said:
The European and World War bears the sharp marks of a bourgeois-imperialist and dynastic war. A struggle for markets, for freedom to loot foreign countries, a tendency to put an end to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and democracy within the separate countries, a tendency to fool, to disunite, to slaughter the proletariat of all countries by inflaming the wage slaves of the other for the benefit of the bourgeoisie—this is the only real meaning and significance of the war. . . .
From this statement much followed. The Bolsheviks in Russia endorsed the point of view expressed by Lenin, and developed their policy accordingly. The transformation of the Imperialist war into civil war was thenceforward the key to all the activities of the Party within Russia. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were the outstanding supporters of the policy outside Russia, but it was of greater significance for Russia than for any other country, for of all the nations none was comparable in its ripeness for revolutionary changes. The chaos in the governing classes revealed by the 1905 rising was not swept away by the triumph of the Stolypin reaction—the killing of thousands of revolutionaries and the filling of the prisons and camps of exile. The autocracy was still intact. Feudalism was still at the helm of government. The capitalist economic revolution was gathering speed and reproducing on an ever-widening scale the conditions which had engendered the ideas behind the 1905 affair and made it possible.
Russia, at the outbreak of the war in 1914, harboured the seeds of two revolutions. Had the Czar given his country her “1789 Revolution” in 1905, i.e., established a constitutional monarchy with a liberal constitution, Russia would have entered the war of 1914 in the full flush of expanding industrialism. The Czar did nothing of the kind, and hence the war made demands upon the Czarist Government that it was congenitally incapable of handling. Prime Ministers and Ministers of State followed each other across the stage of history with panic rapidity as the hysterical Czarina urged her feeble husband to do the bidding of the disreputable Rasputin. The industrialists engaged on war production racketeered without interference. The peasants gave their sons to the war by the million, and the soldiers fought bravely despite stupendous losses. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, the rear became incapable of maintaining supplies to the fighting forces. Regiment after regiment was left without guns or ammunition. At home, prices soared and real wages fell. In 1913 the average monthly earnings of employees in industry amounted to 85.5 roubles (about £8 11s.) a month. By January 1917 they were down to 38 roubles (£3 16s.) a month. Meanwhile rents rose in the cities and towns to 200 and 300 per cent above the 1913 level. Strikes, which had almost vanished on the outbreak of war, reappeared with increasing frequency and on a constantly larger scale. During August-December of 1914 there were only sixty-eight strikes involving 34,753 Workers. In the same months of 1916 there were 1,410 strikes involving 1,086,364 strikers.
The spirit of defeatism spread both at the top and bottom of society. It spread at the top until members of the nobility assassinated Rasputin and flung his body into the Neva. It spread at the bottom in misery and hunger until the masses rose in revolt and forced the Duma, composed of the gentry, to insist on the Czar’s abdication. On March 8th, 1917, after an interview with Protopopov, the Prime Minister, who had tried to tell him of the serious state of affairs throughout the country, the Czar left St. Petersburg. He went to the headquarters of the Army, and wrote to his wife the same night: “I shall take up dominoes in my spare time. . . . My brain is resting here, no ministers, no troublesome questions demanding thought. I consider that this is good for me. . . .
On the day of his departure to “take up dominoes” there were food riots in the streets of St. Petersburg. Two days later the crowds were vaster, and the Cossacks were friendly to the people. That night at 9 p.m. in response to a telephone message, Czar Nicholas replied: “I demand that the disorders in the capital shall be stopped to-morrow.” As well might he have commanded the tides to cease. On the 11th of March the Volynsky Regiment fired on the crowd, retired to its barracks, mutinied, and shot one of its officers. The revolution had begun. The Czar ordered the Duma to be dissolved. This conservative assembly had now to assume revolutionary responsibilities or perish. Shulgin, the leader of the Conservatives proper, urged Rodzianko, president of the Duma, “to seize power before somebody else more dangerous took things in hand.” Instead of agreeing to the Czar’s demand, the Duma formed what it called a “Progressive Bloc” and set up a Provisional Government.
Meanwhile the workers in the factories were electing delegates. The Soviets were coming into being. And the Soviets elected an Executive Committee which established itself in the hall of the Budget Committee of the Duma. One of its Vice-Presidents was a leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and was also a member of the Duma. His name was Kerensky.
The crowds in the streets were growing. The old Tory Rodzianko, who no more desired a revolt than to work in a coal-mine, made ponderous speeches to the crowds, and the crowds sang the Marseillaise. Prime Minister Protopopov and other Czarist ministers were arrested by the Provisional Government. Fighting was going on in St. Petersburg when on the 14th of March the Czar set out with escort to return. On the 15th the soldiers began to elect delegates to the Soviets: the Czar sent other troops to “restore order.” The new troops fraternised with the revolutionary soldiers. Czardom was gone.
Because of the danger in St. Petersburg, the Czar’s carriage was diverted to Pskov. Meanwhile capitalists, lawyers, and gentry all gathered round the newly-formed government; and on March 15th, Nicholas signed a form of abdication in favour of his brother the Grand Duke Michael. The latter, however, understood the situation better than the Czar, and refused the honour unless the invitation were to come from the promised Constituent Assembly—that political bran-tub of the revolution to which bourgeois politicians of all shades posted their pledges for the morrow.
Two new authorities were now in control of the situation—the Provisional Government of the Duma, headed by Prince Lvov, and the Soviets, representative of the risen people, workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. The Provisional Government was only indirectly a product of the upheaval. It had not come from the people. It was an appendage of Czardom which, severed from the Czar, had had thrust upon it responsibilities of government which it had no desire to shoulder. Its foreign policy was that of the Czar—continuation of the war and fulfilment of the Treaties made by the Czar’s governments. Its home policy consisted of holding back the Jacobin crowds and postponing all radical changes until holding of the Constituent Assembly which it hesitated to call together.
It was the revolutionary rising of the people that had forced it to break with the Czar, and similarly its future policy would be determined by this new force organised in the Soviets. As soon as the first Executive Committee of the Soviets was formed it established liaison with the Provisional Government, and the liaison officer was the Social Revolutionary lawyer Kerensky. So long as this liaison could be maintained the Provisional Government would be recognised as the head of the State and the possibility of restraining the revolution from going “too far” remained. The liaison committee therefore became the means by which the Government maintained organic contact with the masses, while the promise of the Constituent Assembly successfully devitalised the Soviets by the constant deferment of their domestic demands to a vague and nebulous future.
It was a most confused situation, in which nothing was definite except the fact that Czardom had gone and no authority was yet firmly established in its place. All classes were fraternising, singing the songs of liberty, hailing the unaccustomed freedom; and no one seemed to know what should be done next. The prison doors had opened, but the exiles had not yet reached home.
Some there are, who, anxious to belittle Bolshevism, point to this state of affairs as a complete refutation both of the responsibility of the Bolsheviks for the Revolution and of their theories concerning revolutionary development. It is obvious that the Bolsheviks did not plan this uprising, the fact being that they did not hold the view that such a rising could be planned. A minority can plan an insurrection, organise it, and seize power; but the kind of revolution the Bolsheviks had in mind must be timed to coincide with the rising of the people or fail. No Bolshevik ever held the view that it is possible to make a revolution in a non-revolutionary situation, and none ever thought that a revolutionary situation could be created by propaganda. Nor had Lenin left his party in doubt as to what he meant by a “revolutionary situation.” He explained that it has three outstanding characteristics:
(1) When it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their power unchanged; there is a crisis “higher up,” taking one from another; there is a crisis in the policy of the ruling class; as a result there appears a crack through which the dissatisfaction and the revolt of the oppressed classes burst forth . . . (2) the wants and the sufferings of the oppressed classes become more acute than usual; (3) . . . a considerable increase in the activity of the masses; without these objective changes, which are independent not only of the will of the separate groups and parties but even of separate classes, a revolution, as a rule, is impossible. The co-existence of all these objective changes constitutes a revolutionary situation.
No Bolshevik would therefore dream of claiming responsibility for the March Revolution of 1917. But only the most prejudiced would disregard the influence of the Bolsheviks on the Russian working-class which had set the revolution on the march. Nor can we afford to ignore the fact that ever since the 1905 Revolution the Bolsheviks had insisted upon the necessity of preparing for the next, and had incessantly combated the Mensheviks on this very issue. As long ago as 1906, at the Stockholm Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Stalin had posed and answered the question of its leadership when he declared: “Either the hegemony of the proletariat or the hegemony of the democratic bourgeoisie—that is how the question stands in the party, that is where we differ.”
Then both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had been clear about the prospective situation; but neither had foreseen the confusion which was to emerge in March 1917. Neither had come to any clear decision as to the part to be played by the Soviets. Bolshevik and Menshevik alike had thought the revolution would consist of the abdication of the Czar, the destruction of absolutism, and the establishment of a democratic régime of the Western type. The programme of the Bolsheviks said:
. . . the first and immediate task put before itself by the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is to overthrow the Czarist monarchy and to create a democratic republic whose constitution would guarantee the following:
(1) The sovereignty of the people, i.e., the concentration of all supreme state power in the hands of a legislative assembly, consisting of the people’s representatives, and forming one chamber.
(2) Universal, equal, and direct suffrage for all male and female citizens, twenty years old or over, at all elections to the legislative assembly and to the various local organs of self-government; the secret ballot at elections; the right of every voter to be elected into any representative institution; biennial parliaments; salaries to be paid to the people’s representatives; proportional representation at all elections; recall, without exception, of all delegates and elected officers, at any time, by the will of the majority of their electors. . . .
This programme was retained by the Bolsheviks when they established themselves as an independent party by expelling the Mensheviks. But it is only necessary to examine it in relation to Russian conditions to realise that when its authors drafted it, they had in mind the circumstances of the Western countries rather than the specific Russian circumstances to which it would have to be applied. The conditions specified in the second paragraph were almost exclusively applicable to countries with the industrial and cultural level of Western Europe.
The programme assumed the possibility of elections as in Germany or England, press campaigns, public meetings, publicity campaigns on the part of parties and candidates, and above all, an electorate that could read and write. But seventy-five to eighty per cent of those who would be called upon to vote could neither read nor write! There was a further assumption that the industrialisation of Russia and the accompanying developments of modern capitalist society were already fully established, which as everybody knows, they were not.
Why had the Bolsheviks thus stopped short in their analysis of the Russian Revolution? I think the answer lies in the fact that no one prior to March, 1917, had developed Marx’s theory of the State from where Marx had left it. While he had emphasised repeatedly that the capitalist State must be destroyed and be replaced by “the dictatorship of the Proletariat,” he had not worked out the structural form of the proletarian State, though he had certainly seen its prototype in the Paris Commune. But in 1917 Lenin carried Marx’s analysis to its logical completion in his “April Theses” and his book State and Revolution. Until the March uprising the Bolsheviks had merely fought the Mensheviks on the issue of which class should lead the revolution—bourgeois or proletariat—and had come down on the side of the “proletariat.” They were quite clear about conquering power by revolutionary means—armed insurrection and civil war—but they saw the situation too simply, namely as the overthrow of the Czar and his administration, the establishment of a single-chamber parliament on the Western model, and the setting-up of the Bolshevik Party as the leading party of the proletariat. They had failed to see that the type of social revolution they were aspiring to lead develops its own organs of government.
Hence when the Revolution of March, 1917, again brought Soviets into being as the power-instrument of workers, peasants and soldiers, it developed the Soviets much further than in 1905. In that year they had been essentially strike weapons, weapons of the political general strike. The soldiers did not form their Soviets. But when the revolt in 1917 surged through Army, Navy, towns and villages alike, the masses everywhere formed Soviets. They were not puzzled about how to organise themselves. The majority could neither read nor write, but they knew who could speak for them and they could elect their spokesmen, if not by secret ballot, certainly by show of hands in open meeting. This they had learned from the events of 1905 and the persistent campaigns of the Social Democrats. The Soviets thus represented the strength of the masses, the means whereby they would exercise their dictatorship in due course when they had become conscious of the power which lay in their hands. The Bolsheviks were to give them that consciousness, but not yet.
The more the revolution spread throughout the country the less could the Provisional Government do without the support of the Soviets. But those who had formed them had done so without realising that they were challenging the continued existence of another power in the community. They were forming a State power without realising the full implications of what they were doing, and the Provisional Government’s promise of a Constituent Assembly added to the confusion.
Only one man saw at once the full significance of the situation and was insistent on the course of action to be pursued. That man was Lenin. Joseph Stalin, his second in command, did not as yet see matters with Lenin’s eyes.
Neither of the leaders was in St. Petersburg when the Revolution burst upon the world. Stalin was in Siberia, Lenin in Geneva. As soon as the news of the Czar’s abdication reached Siberia the guards of the prison villages melted away, and thousands of political exiles set off for home. Stalin and Sverdlov, however, like many other revolutionaries, had no homes in the domestic sense. In any case it was not of domesticity they were thinking. On March 25th, 1917, Stalin arrived at St. Petersburg. Sverdlov arrived. Kamenev arrived. Kalinin arrived. Lenin was reported on his way.
Without more ado the returned exiles resumed their leading positions in co-operation with the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Actually they would have proved themselves wiser men had they waited awhile. Their position was a difficult one. On March 18th the Central Committee of the Party had issued a manifesto based on the old Party programme:
It is the task of the working-class and the revolutionary army to create a Provisional Revolutionary Government which is to head the new republican order now in the process of birth. The Provisional Revolutionary Government must take upon itself to create temporary laws defending all the rights and liberties of the people, to confiscate the lands of the monasteries and the landowners, the crown lands and appanages, to introduce the 8-hour work-day and to convoke a Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage, with no discrimination as to sex, nationality or religion, and with the secret ballot. . . .
Pravda had followed with leading articles proclaiming that “Our slogan is—pressure on the Provisional Government”—i.e., to make it go the Bolshevik way. The new arrivals thus found a policy already formulated and in operation, which by no means answered the problems arising from the Revolution. The Central Committee, in fact, had spoken according to its written programme without first finding out whether the words were appropriate to the circumstances.
Stalin and Kamenev were put in charge of Pravda, and were at once faced with all the conundrums that events had so unexpectedly presented. Was this the “bourgeois democratic revolution” for which they had striven and to which they had directed the workers? If so, which was the real authority, the Provisional Government of the Duma or the Soviets? Or were both these bodies but temporary affairs pending the promised Constituent Assembly? The Bolsheviks were definitely puzzled.
They were opposed to the war, which they had denounced as Imperialist: the Provisional Government had assumed all the obligations of the Czar’s Government and was for continuing the war. The Bolsheviks were in a minority in the Soviets, and the majority, who were followers either of Kerensky and the Socialist Revolutionary Party or of the Mensheviks, were likewise for the war.
The Bolsheviks began to grope towards a new orientation. Writing in Pravda two days after his arrival, Stalin said:
the Soviets had to hold on to the rights that have been won, in order to finish off the old forces and, in conjunction with the provinces, advance the Russian revolution still further. . . . They must consolidate their position, make the Soviets universal, and link them together under the ægis of the Central Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies as the organ of the revolutionary power of the people. . . .
Two days later he wrote: “We must tear the mask from the imperialist and reveal to the masses what is really behind the present war—but this means declaring real war on war, it means making the present war impossible.” By the end of the first week he had got to the stage of saying that it was necessary to “mobilise all the living forces of the people against the counter-revolution. . . . The only body that can serve as this organ is a National Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’, and peasants’ Deputies.” “Groping” is the only appropriate word to describe such writing. The measure of Stalin’s dissatisfaction with the position is the dissimilarity of these quotations to his usual lucid and emphatic style.
Fortunately for the Bolsheviks there was a man approaching from Geneva who was not groping. On April 16th, 1917, Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders went to meet Lenin at Byelo-ostrov and travelled with him to St. Petersburg. The story of Lenin’s arrival has been variously told. He was in a hurry, and uninterested in bouquets and cheers. Of course he was happy to be back in Russia. But what had happened to the Party leaders? Why this groping and confusion? What sort of rubbish is this in Pravda—“to support the Provisional Government in so far as . . .”?
Lenin had not seen in advance that the revolution would take the form which marked these days. But not for a moment was he confused by them. With that amazing capacity of his for understanding history in the making, he analysed the situation and set forth his strategy for the party of insurrection. Day by day, ever since receiving the first news of the revolution, he had sent off his “Letters from Afar” from Geneva, but they had not reached Pravda until he himself arrived. On his way home he had written what have become famous as his “April Theses.” On the day of his arrival he hastened from the railway station to the headquarters of the Party and put the Theses before the Party leaders.
No political bombshell ever burst with more telling effect. Anyone reading them had to make up his mind about them in a decisive way. They could not be side-tracked or dismissed as of no account. Whoever was groping for the forward path would find it lit up with blazing light. Whoever rejected them would have to fight as never before.
Lenin wrote:
The revolutionary proletariat could give their consent to a revolutionary war of defence only on condition (a) that all power was transferred to the proletariat and its ally, the poorest sector of the peasants, (b) that all annexations be renounced in deeds, not merely in words; (c) a complete break with all interests of capital.
The present situation represents a transition from the first stage of the revolution to its second stage, which is to place all power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasants. . . . Hence no support can be given to the Provisional Government. . . . The Bolsheviks are in a minority in the Soviets. They must win the majority. . . . No longer do we want a Parliamentary Republic, for that would mean a step backward. We must go forward to a Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, and Peasant Deputies. We must nationalise the land and merge the banks into one great National Bank controlled by the Soviets. Our immediate task is not to introduce Socialism but to bring all production under the control of the Soviet Government. . . . The confusion in the Party must be ended by a Party convention which will change the programme of the Party and bring it into line with the needs of the revolution . . .
Consternation took hold of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. Lenin laid about his opponents with a vigour and an incisiveness which astounded friend and foe. Never had a leader dared so much. It was clear he was determined that the Bolshevik Party should accept his point of view or he would split it and form a new one. The fact that the whole Party was in an uncertain state of mind reduced the opposition to a minimum. Kamenev, who in all crises proved himself more a Menshevik than a Bolshevik, led what fight there was. Stalin listened, distressed that he had not seen the situation clearly from the first. The more he thought over the arguments advanced by Lenin, the more feeble his own policy appeared to him. He talked over the situation with Lenin, saw that his leader was right, and without further hesitation lined up with him for the coming struggle.
Years later, speaking of these events, Stalin said: “It is no wonder that the Bolsheviks, having been scattered by Czarism into prison and exile and only now able to come together from all the ends of Russia to work out a new platform, could not in one stroke find their way in the new situation . . . I shared my mistaken viewpoint with the majority of the Party, and surrendered it fully about the middle of April, adopting Lenin’s April Theses.”
This alibi comes very feebly across the years, and certainly tones down the importance of the Party crisis in those April days when Russia’s millions were rising from their knees. Surely the bigness of the crisis cannot be measured by its two weeks’ duration, but rather by its intensity. The fact is that none of the Bolshevik leaders agreed with Lenin because his proposals were so profound that they revolutionised the whole Party programme; and one may be forgiven for wondering what price the Russian workers and peasants would have had to pay in terms of bitter experience had not Lenin arrived and swept the Party into line behind him.
It may be asked, what of Trotsky in all this? The answer is that Trotsky who was not a member of the Bolshevik Party, had not returned from his self-imposed exile in the U.S.A, where he had formulated the demand for “No Czar, but a Workers’ Government”—a demand which Lenin castigated as “playing at seizing power.”
Fortunately for the Bolshevik Party and the fate of the Russian Revolution, Lenin and his April Theses had arrived. The road to the November Revolution was made clear. The party of insurrection had still to prepare for the insurrectionary days that lay ahead, but it now knew that it had to prepare for them and how to prepare. And therein lay the great difference between the affairs of March and the affairs of April.
Next: VIII. On the Road to Insurrection