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WSWS : History : Russia & the former Soviet Union

In Defense of the Russian Revolution

A Reply to the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification

By David North

Use this version to print

The following lecture was delivered in two parts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on April 11 and 18, 1995.

In a recent series of articles that appeared in a radical journal, Mr. Alan Wald, who teaches at this campus and even calls himself a socialist, has written that "young activists" are uninterested in Trotskyism and consider it irrelevant. He cites this as decisive evidence of the complete failure of Trotskyism in the United States. The attitude of the young activists, he argues, proves that the time has come to bury Trotskyism once and for all.

Now, even if the lack of interest that Mr. Wald attributes so broadly to young activists is actually as widespread as he suggests, those of us who consider ourselves Trotskyists are not inclined to draw the conclusion that he advances. The validity of a political program is not necessarily determined by the extent of its popularity at any given moment. This is especially true today. There is a profound crisis in political culture. The intellectual climate is stagnant, and young people have been raised in a social environment that is, even by American standards, characterized by an exceptional degree of historical ignorance and political backwardness. Young people are not responsible for this, but to the extent that their attitudes have been shaped by the political and social environment, it is necessary to raise their consciousness of history and politics. They need not less but more exposure to classical Marxism, whose scientific method and historical traditions find expression in the Trotskyist movement.

There are, however, reasons to be somewhat suspicious about Wald's attribution of indifference and contempt to the youth. Our recent experience has provided an objective indication that young people are searching for answers to the social problems of our time and are once again looking toward history for those answers. The turnout of over 225 students at the lecture of Professor Vadim Rogovin here at the University of Michigan in March is an expression of a renewed interest in the greatest political event of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution. And where there is interest in the problems of the Russian Revolution, there will, inevitably, be interest in the political ideas with which the name of Leon Trotsky is associated.

As I read Wald's articles, I recalled one feature of Professor Rogovin’s lecture that struck me as particularly significant even at the time: the virtual absence of the faculty. I do not believe that there were more than three or four members of the U of M faculty who attended the lecture. This was in stark contrast to the big turnout of faculty members one week earlier to hear the lecture of the reactionary mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. This man is an avowed racist, who as mayor has presided over the impoverishment of the working class population of that city. Sobchak’s speech included a filthy diatribe against non-Russians who reside in St. Petersburg. But not a single member of the faculty rose to condemn his remarks.

There may be special reasons why, here at the University of Michigan, there was such a difference between the reception accorded by the faculty to Anatoly Sobchak on February 28 and to Vadim Rogovin just one week later. It is perhaps the case that the relations between the business community, which is heavily speculating on the growth of capitalist enterprise in Russia, and the college department responsible for Russian studies is exceptionally close.

But it is, in the final analysis, a reflection of a general and widespread problem. Contrary to the claims of the media and bourgeois politicians, the universities and colleges are hardly centers of subversive thought in the United States. Rather, over the past 15 years the intellectual environment has become increasingly right wing and this tendency has been notably accelerated by the collapse of the USSR. The breakup of the Soviet Union has provoked an eruption of literature proclaiming that the final collapse in 1991 was the inevitable outcome of the October Revolution itself; that the entire history and, indeed, prehistory of the Soviet Union, dating all the way back to the origins of Bolshevism in 1903 and the October Revolution in 1917, was the unfolding of a criminal enterprise; and, finally, that the 74-year history of the Soviet Union represented some sort of perverse departure from the "normal" course of history. I do not wish to suggest that all works on Soviet history adopt this view. There are many admirable exceptions, but the works of serious historians are by far less well known.

Permit me to review some of the conceptions that are being advanced by contemporary reactionary historians. Professor Rogovin referred to the work of the Russian "historian" Dmitri Volkogonov, who represents legions of ex-Soviet officials and academics who have, since the collapse of the USSR, transformed themselves without any signs of internal intellectual conflict into raving anticommnunists.

I would like to cite two of the best known American works that depict the Russian Revolution as a criminal and senseless aberration from the "normal" course of history. Richard Pipes is a professor of history at Harvard University. The gist of his argument is that the Russian Revolution was an underground conspiracy organized by a small number of power-crazed intellectuals who lacked any substantial support among the masses. He writes at the conclusion of his second volume:

"The intelligentsia, which we have defined as intellectuals craving power, stood in total and uncompromising hostility to the existing order: nothing the Tsarist regime could do short of committing suicide would have satisfied it. They were revolutionaries not for the sake of improving the condition of the people, but for the sake of gaining domination over the people and remaking them in their own image....

"Whatever grievances they may have harbored—real and fancied—the ‘masses’ neither needed nor desired a revolution: the only group interested in it was the intelligentsia. Stress on alleged popular discontent and class conflict derives more from ideological preconceptions than from the facts at hand, namely from the discredited idea that political developments are always and everywhere driven by socioeconomic conflicts, they are mere ‘foam’ on the surface of currents that really guide human destiny" (Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993], pp. 495, 497).

The position of Pipes is very clear: he opposes historical interpretations based on the analysis of socioeconomic forces, that is, of classes. From his standpoint, social revolutions are always illegitimate. He denies that revolutions must be studied as objective social phenomena, arising out of the complex interaction of social and economic contradictions on both a national and international scale. In other words, revolutions are to be denounced and condemned, rather than understood and explained. The revolutionaries, such as Lenin and Trotsky, are depicted in such works as evil manipulators who somehow manage, for reasons that can barely be comprehended on a rational basis, to involve millions of people in their evil schemes

In arguing this position, Pipes is compelled to ignore historical facts, toward which he, and other right-wing ideologues, display contempt. For example, he simply asserts that the Russian working class played no significant role in the revolution. This is like saying that the sans-culottes played no significant role in the French Revolution! If anything was obvious to the world in 1917, it was that the great social force behind the events that brought the Bolsheviks to power was the Russian working class, which, despite its small size relative to the entire population, was able to play the dominant role in revolutionary events due to its concentrated and strategic position in Russian industry.

During the past decade, important research by genuine but less well-known scholars has provided a wealth of information about the Russian working class and the development of Bolshevik influence within the factories and other work locations. Pipes actually acknowledges this work, only to dismiss it:

"Hordes of graduate students," he writes, "steered by their professors, in the Soviet Union as well as the West, especially the United States, have assiduously combed historical sources in the hope of unearthing evidence of worker radicalism in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The results are weighty tomes, filled with mostly meaningless events and statistics, that prove only that while history is always interesting, history books can be both vacuous and dull" (ibid., p. 494).

It is strange for a supposed "historian" to refer to events and statistics as "meaningless." One has every right to conclude that Pipes employs that description to justify his subjectively-motivated dismissal of everything that tends to contradict his own right-wing and objectively untenable preconceptions.

Allow me at this point to refer to an extremely important observation made by Professor Rogovin. He drew a distinction between a theoretically-guided evaluation of historical events that is based on the consistent application of a scientific methodology and mere opinion. I heartily agree with Professor Rogovin's criticism of the widespread notion in the United States that all judgments on the past are merely the expressions of personal opinions and all are equally valid. Underlying this superficially democratic standpoint is the conception that it is impossible, when dealing with historical events, to establish objective truth. The past, according to this popular idea, is merely something about which everybody has, and is entitled to have, his own opinion.

Now, lest anyone accuse Marxists of being antidemocratic, let me immediately make it clear that we do not wish to deprive anyone of the right to have opinions, no matter how stupid they may be. Nevertheless, there is a profound difference between an opinion about some past event and a scientific conception of historical phenomena. In his History of Philosophy, the great Hegel asked, "What can be more useless than to learn a string of bald opinion, and what more unimportant?" Arguing for a scientific examination of the historical development of philosophical thought; as opposed to a series of subjective judgments about this or that thinker, Hegel explained: "An opinion is a subjective conception, an uncontrolled thought, an idea which may occur to me in one direction or in another: an opinion is mine.... But Philosophy possesses no opinion, for there is no such thing as philosophical opinions. When we hear a man speaking of philosophical opinion, even though he be an historian of philosophy itself, we detect at once this want of fundamental education. Philosophy is the objective science of truth, it is the science of necessity, conceiving knowledge, and neither opinion nor the spinning out of opinions" (G.W.F. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, [New York: The Humanities Press, 1974], vol. I, p. 12).

Now this should not be taken to mean that the study and evaluation of history permits only one interpretation of a given set of facts. Complex historical processes generate, by their very nature, disputes and controversies. It is not the aim of serious intellectual work to abolish disputes and impose one uniform interpretation. But what serious historical research should aim to achieve, as Hegel suggested, is a more profound understanding of the objective logic and interconnection of the events that it studies. Again, to answer the vulgarizers and falsifiers of Marxism, this does not mean producing a history that proclaims that Event A happened and could only have happened in this exact way and on this exact date. The loom of history consists of the most complex and fascinating interweaving of the woof of necessity and the warp of accident. Far from imposing upon us a monochromatic view, Marxism allows a far richer appreciation of the subtle shadings of historical processes.

Let us return to the reactionary historians, who, as we shall see from the work of the next author, have a remarkably unhistorical view of human development in general and the Russian Revolution in particular. In The Soviet Tragedy, Martin Malia proclaims that the collapse of the Soviet Union arose inexorably from the socialist aspirations of the Russian Revolution.

"[T]he failure of integral socialism," he writes, "stems not from its having been tried out first in the wrong place, Russia, but from the socialist idea per se. And the reason for this failure is that socialism as full noncapitalism is intrinsically impossible. For the suppression of private property, profit, and the market is tantamount to the suppression of civil society and all individual autonomy.... It becomes, in effect, an effort to suppress the real world, and this is something that cannot succeed in the long run" (Martin F. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 [New York: The Free Press, 1994], p. 225).

The recorded history of mankind spans 5,000 to 6,000 years. The unrecorded history of our species spans perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 years. But the entire history of the economic system known as capitalism spans no more than five or six centuries. The history of industrial capitalism is limited to little more than two centuries. From the chronology of human development, it is quite evident that human beings have lived under a very wide range of socioeconomic systems. We are homo sapiens, not homo capitalistus. Capitalism is no more intrinsic to our human essence than feudalism or slavery. Malia, who cannot envision a world without stocks, bonds and derivatives, reproduces in contemporary form the reactionary outlook of the clerical apologists of feudalism who, not so long ago, opposed bourgeois democracy on the grounds that the organization of society on the basis of rigidly defined estates corresponded to the divine order in which God ruled over a celestial hierarchy that extended from the angels and archangels to the rosy cherubim and seraphim.

If history teaches us anything at all, it is that mankind is engaged in a continuing process of social evolution. To argue, as Malia does, that evolution beyond capitalism is impossible, and that property, profit and the market represent the ultimate achievement and final form of human existence is a mockery of history.

In the writings of Pipes and Malia, we are confronted not with history, but with raw ideology. These works would hardly be worth commenting upon were it not for the fact that they reflect the view of the Russian Revolution that predominates within both the popular media and the colleges and universities. In periods of political reaction, as Trotsky once said so well, ignorance bares its teeth.

Alongside the works that condemn the October Revolution, there are those which argue along the following lines: whatever the legitimacy of the Russian Revolution in 1917, its ultimate failure has dealt a staggering blow to Marxism. Even if the actions of the Bolsheviks could be justified in the context of 1917, the collapse of the Soviet Union must be seen as the definitive end of a historical era in which socialist revolution, based on the working class, could be imagined as an alternative to capitalism. With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the book of the "short" twentieth century, which began in 1914 with the beginning of World War I, the event that triggered the Russian Revolution, has closed. The Russian Revolution therefore belongs to a distant world, that is, to another century and age whose concerns are very different from our own. Marxism, while it may continue to be a subject of scholarly interest, has little to say about the problems that confront mankind as it enters the twenty-first century. Whatever may happen in the new era, it is unlikely that it will derive lessons, let alone draw inspiration, from the Russian Revolution.

That, in a nutshell, is the central idea behind a recently-published work, The Age of Extremes, by E.J. Hobsbawm. His work is more serious than that of Pipes and Malia. But the thesis that he advances is rather superficial. There is nothing necessarily wrong about defining, for purposes of intellectual clarification, a century in terms other than the formally correct 100 years. The calendar possesses no occult properties and it does not determine the flow of historical events. There are historians, I believe Hobsbawm is among them, who argue that the nineteenth century began, in political terms, with the French Revolution of 1789; and there are others who insist that the eighteenth century did not come to an end until the final defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

The demise of the Soviet Union is without question a historical milestone. But the problem is that Hobsbawm is saying a good deal more than that. This is not the place to examine in detail the political conceptions that guide much of what Hobsbawm writes. But it must be pointed out that he was for many decades one of the principal intellectual representatives of the British Communist Party. He remains to this day an apologist for Stalinism, and this heavily colors his interpretation of this century’s history. First, Hobsbawm identifies in an essentially uncritical manner socialism with the Soviet state in all the forms of its existence from 1917 to 1991. As he says in one particularly offensive passage, for advocates of world socialism the Soviet Union was "the only game in town." This, it must be said, is manifestly untrue. As Hobsbawm knows very well, but does not care to discuss in his book, the struggle of Trotskyists against Stalinism was centered precisely on the Soviet bureaucracy’s betrayal of the cause of international socialism. Significantly, in his complete identification of the USSR with socialism, Hobsbawm comes very close to the position of Malia, who rejects any attempt to distinguish Stalinism from socialism on the grounds that the Soviet Union was socialism’s "coin of the realm." Of course, Hobsbawm’s intentions are different from Malia’s. But his general identification of the Soviet Union with socialism is central to his thesis that the end of the USSR, and with it, the close of the "short" twentieth century, represents the end of socialism itself. From this there follows the conclusion that Marxism and socialism are of little relevance to the new world of the twenty-first century.

Hobsbawm’s thesis of the "short twentieth century" trivializes rather than clarifies. Notwithstanding the significance of this political event, the end of the USSR does not represent as profound a break in the course of historical development as Hobsbawm and most other bourgeois commentators claim. First, the state that collapsed in December 1991 had long before ceased to represent anything that could conceivably be identified as socialism, at least as Lenin would have understood that term. Second, despite the sharp changes in geopolitical and interstate alignments produced by the end of the USSR, it can hardly be stated that we are witnessing the birth of a "new world order." Rather, the demise of the USSR seems much more to be part of the protracted death throes of the old one. Indeed, the political alignments that have emerged in the post-Soviet period suggest a return to pre-1917 patterns of interimperialist conflict rather than the point of departure for something radically new. The tensions and conflicts that dominate the world today eerily recall those that prevailed on the eve of World War I. Rather than having ended before its time, the twentieth century seems to be very much alive and ... ticking!

In the course of this century, there have been astonishing changes. And yet, considered from the standpoint of the dominant social, economic and political issues, the world of 1995 is not as far removed from that of 1900 as one might at first think. There have been, it goes without saying, staggering changes in technology and these have had a profound impact on virtually every aspect of social life. We live today, to a degree that would have been almost inconceivable at the turn of this century, in a truly international environment. No part of the inhabited world is more than one or two days of travel away. There are very few places with which we cannot establish instantaneous electronic communications. And yet—and this may be considered the tragedy of our historical epoch—the twentieth century is approaching its official conclusion without having been able to solve any of the great historical questions that were posed at its beginning.

For all the technological transformations, the social structure of society and the basis of economic life remain essentially as they were in 1900. Today, as at the beginning of the century, the driving principle of social life is the conflict, no matter how it is concealed, between capital and labor. The extraction of surplus value through the exploitation of the labor power of the working class remains the basis of the capitalist mode of production. Of course, there have been vast changes in the size and composition of the world’s population since the beginning of the century. There has been a huge decline in the size and significance of the peasantry. But this change represents, on a world scale, the growth of the social and economic role of the working class, and, with that, the deepening of the basic conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The demise of the Soviet Union, which was, in reality, only the final chapter in the decades-long betrayal of the Russian and international working class by the Stalinist regime, has contributed mightily to the disillusionment and disorientation of the working class. Combined with the betrayals of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries by the reformist labor parties and trade unions, it appears on the surface that capitalism is more powerful than at any time in its history. The entire historical perspective of socialism, compromised for so long in the eyes of millions by the crimes of Stalinism, seems to so many to have lost its validity.

But for all the confusion generated by events that are not easily comprehended, there remain the contradictions of the capitalist system, which, contrary to the received wisdom of the moment, have already attained a level of intensity without precedent since the end of World War II. The daily convulsion on the currency exchanges, the intensifying conflicts among the major imperialist powers, and, above all, the steady deterioration in the social conditions of broad sections of the working and middle classes portend the emergence of a revolutionary crisis.

The twentieth century has not yet come to its conclusion. We still live in the same epoch that produced the October Revolution, and those clever historians who argue otherwise are as shortsighted as those who would build their homes on the rim of Mt. Vesuvius. This century of wars and revolution has not seen its last eruption.

It is from this standpoint that we undertake to review the ideological and political origins of the Russian Revolution.

Almost exactly 100 years ago, on August 5, 1895, Frederick Engels, the great collaborator of Karl Marx, died at the age of 74. He had survived Marx by 12 years and had lived long enough not only to complete the editing of the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, but also to witness the astonishing rise of mass working class parties in Europe that had been inspired by Marxism, especially the German Social Democratic Party. But especially since the death of Marx, capitalism had undergone a staggering worldwide expansion. The years between 1873 and 1893, though characterized by a depression in profits, saw a tremendous increase in the productivity of labor and the rapid geographic expansion of advanced industrial production. Despite their apparent contradiction, there was a profound and lawful connection between the depression in prices and profits on the one hand and the explosive growth of productivity. For reasons explained by Marx, it was the very pressure on the rate of profit that provided the objective spur for the development of technology and the worldwide expansion of capitalism. Indeed, a similar process was to be observed again exactly a century later. The severe recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, which sent profits plummeting, provided the objective impulse for the astonishing changes in the organization of international capitalism that are associated with the introduction of computer technology into all aspects of production and communications.

The end of the price and profit depression, on the eve of Engels’s death, inaugurated an era of prosperity and economic growth that was without precedent in world history. Nearly a half-century after Marx and Engels had penned The Communist Manifesto, capitalism appeared, at least on the surface, to be possessed of an irresistible and inexhaustible dynamism. This was the age that witnessed the birth of modern corporations and the implementation of highly rationalized production on the basis of scientific methods of organization and calculation. For the first time, office work became a mass phenomenon and a crucial aspect of economic activity. The critical inventions that were to become the defining features of modern life—the telephone, automobile, airplane and the cinema—first made, or were about to make, their appearance.

The teachings of Marx and Engels had explained that the internal contradictions of the capitalist system would produce a catastrophic crisis that would provide the objective preconditions for a socialist revolution. During the protracted depression of the 1870s and 1880s, the rapid growth of the workers movement seemed to vindicate this analysis. But with the end of the depression in the early 1890s and the sharp improvement in living standards for substantial sections of the middle class and even sections of the working class, doubts emerged about the viability of the revolutionary perspective of Marx and Engels. The individual who became the principal spokesman of these doubts, in the first great crisis of Marxism, was a man who had been one of the best-known associates of Engels during his final years, Eduard Bernstein.

Having been forced by the Anti-Socialist Laws of Bismarck to flee Germany, Bernstein, after a sojourn in Switzerland, eventually settled in Britain. There, he came under the influence of both the Fabians, who based their activity on the conviction that socialism could be realized through a lengthy process of parliamentary reform, and the large and prosperous trade union movement, which had not the slightest interest in the revolutionary overthrow of British capitalism

By the mid-1890s there were signs that the ardor of Bernstein’s revolutionary views was diminishing. But it was not until after Engels’s death that Bernstein began publicly to express his doubts about the basic principles of Marxism. Finally, in January 1898, Bernstein replied to challenges to state clearly where he stood by publishing in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the German Social Democracy, a series of articles in which he called into question every essential Marxist conception.

Bernstein argued that contrary to the claims of Marx and Engels, capitalism was not driven toward ruin by its internal contradictions. The system had shown itself capable of devising "means of adaptation," such as the credit system, whereby it could counteract and suppress its contradictions. Moreover, capitalism had proven itself capable of raising to a significant degree the living standards of the working class. The polarization of society between rich and poor, based on the concentration of production, had not occurred. Rather, the middle class was expanding and increasingly prosperous. As for the working class, it showed little interest in the overthrow of capitalism and was far more concerned with the achievement of reforms that raised its standard of living. Such gains could be achieved on the basis of trade unionism and parliamentary activity.

The political conclusion drawn by Bernstein was that it was necessary for the SPD to abandon the revolutionary program in favor of one based on social reform. In place of the class struggle that had as its goal the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship, Bernstein proposed that the SPD seek an alliance with liberal democratic tendencies among the bourgeoisie and with progressive elements among the petty bourgeoisie in a common political front against the Junkers and the reactionary elements among the big bourgeoisie. The Social Democracy should strive to make itself the focal point of a broadly-based struggle for democratic and progressive social reform. Bernstein concluded that the influence of Social Democracy "would be greater than it is today, if Social Democracy could find the courage to emancipate itself from phraseology that is, in fact, obsolete and to make up its mind to appear what it is in reality today: a democratic socialist party of reform" (Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 186).

Bernstein did not repudiate socialism. But, and this was the essence of his differences with Marx and Engels, Bernstein declared that it was wrong to conceive of socialism as a historical necessity arising out of an economic and/or political catastrophe produced by the law-governed development of capitalist society.

"I have opposed the view," he wrote in The Preconditions of Socialism, "that we stand on the threshold of an imminent collapse of bourgeois society, and that Social Democracy should allow its tactics to be determined by, or made dependent upon, the prospect of any such forthcoming major catastrophe" (ibid p. 1).

What, then, were the practical implications of the perspective that Bernstein advanced for the Social Democratic Party? Above all, that the SPD should concentrate its energies on the promotion of long-term social reforms and the improvement of the conditions of the working class within the framework of capitalism. This required the persistent expansion and strengthening of the party and the trade unions with which it was allied. As for socialism itself, this was to be seen, at most, as the eventual outcome, at some distant future point, of the sum total of the reformist activities of the SPD. It could not and should not, for all intents and purposes, be considered a real item on the active agenda of the SPD. At any rate, Bernstein argued, there did not really exist any specific and identifiable connection between the daily activities of the party and the revolutionary aims proclaimed in the program of the SPD. Bernstein’s outlook was summed up in a phrase that was to become notorious:" The movement is everything; the final goal is nothing."

Bernstein’s writings represented a frontal assault on the traditions and program of the SPD. By the late 1890s, it had become the mass party of the German working class. The theoretical basis for this development had been prepared by Marx and Engels, who had labored for decades under conditions of isolation and, particularly for Marx, extreme poverty. It was only after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 that Marx began to receive European and international recognition.

During the 1870s, Marx and Engels exerted immense influence upon the emerging political movement of the German working class, although it must be stressed that the SPD contained within it conflicting ideological tendencies. The formal establishment of the SPD in 1875 was based on a program that was heavily influenced by the national state socialist conceptions of the Lassallians, with which Marx and Engels were in profound disagreement. Only slowly did the Marxist tendency within the SPD, led by Bebel and Liebknecht, gain the ascendancy. The rapid organizational growth of the SPD and its rise to a position of virtually unchallenged authority within the German working class came, paradoxically, during an 11-year period between 1879 and 1890 when the party was made virtually illegal by the Anti-Socialist Laws introduced by the "Iron Chancellor," Prince Otto von Bismarck.

A curious loophole in the laws allowed the SPD to participate in the parliamentary arena, and so, during the 1880s, increasing numbers of German workers expressed their opposition to the reactionary regime and their solidarity with the socialists by voting for a party that was illegal. By 1890 this illegal party was on the verge of becoming the largest political faction in the Reichstag. This produced a political crisis in the autocratic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm that resulted in the collapse of the Anti-Socialist Laws and the dismissal of Bismarck from office. The SPD won a spectacular political victory, emerged as the most powerful mass party in Europe, and established its political position as the leading socialist party in the newly established Second International.

In 1891 the SPD formally identified itself as a Marxist party with the adoption of the Erfurt Program. However, throughout the decade there existed an increasingly apparent contradiction between the generally reformist character of the party’s political activities and the revolutionary goals that it formally espoused. This contradiction was not the expression of political hypocrisy. The parameters of the SPD’s practical work were, to a great extent, determined by the objective conditions. In a period of dynamic capitalist growth and general political stability, the forms of practical work were largely of a reformist character, even though they were explained and justified in terms of the revolutionary goals of the SPD.

In this sense, Bernstein’s position arose on the basis of an existing and very real contradiction between the revolutionary theory of the party and the unavoidably reformist character of its practical work. Bernstein’s objective was to reformulate the theory and bring it into a pragmatic alignment with the party’s routine activity; that is, to justify reformist activity in explicitly reformist terms.

The initial response within the leadership of the SPD to the writings of Bernstein was rather muted. At first, the tendency within the party hierarchy was to treat Bernstein’s apostasy as a painful family affair that was best swept under the rug. It was only under the pressure of the Russian Marxists, well known for their theoretical intensity and polemical passion, that Bernstein’s views came under bitter and brilliant attack.

The first salvo was launched by Alexander Gelfand, known as Parvus, a revolutionary genius of erratic temperament. He published a series of articles in the German socialist press in which he challenged Bernstein’s denial of the catastrophic implications of the internal contradictions of capitalism. He was followed by Georgi Plekhanov, the austere and imperious "Father of Russian Marxism," who had founded the Emancipation of Labor Group. Plekhanov concentrated his attack on the philosophical positions of Bernstein, who, as Plekhanov effectively demonstrated, was largely ignorant of the dialectical materialist method that Marx had employed in his study of capitalist society.

The next great contribution came from a young Polish revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, who, with characteristic verve, got right to the heart of the controversy with Bernstein in a brilliant pamphlet, Reform or Revolution? In the opening chapter, Luxemburg immediately identified the essential question that was raised by Bernstein’s revision of Marxism:

"Either the socialist transformation is, as was admitted up to now, the consequences of the internal contradictions of the capitalist order—then with this order will develop its contradictions, resulting inevitably, at some point, in its collapse. In this case, however, the ‘means of adaptation’ are ineffective, and the breakdown theory is correct. Or, the ‘means of adaptation’ are really capable of stopping the breakdown of the capitalist system and thereby enable capitalism to maintain itself by suppressing its own contradictions. In that case, socialism ceases to be an historical necessity. It then becomes anything you want to call it, except the result of the material development of society.

"This dilemma leads to another. Either revisionism is correct concerning the course of capitalist development, and therefore the socialist transformation of society becomes a utopia. Or socialism is not a utopia; and therefore the theory of the ‘means of adaptation’ is false. ‘Das ist die Frage, that is the question’" (Dick Howard, ed., Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971], pp. 59-60).

The critical issue that was posed by the dispute with Bernstein was one of historical perspective. If there existed no internal barriers to the progressive and harmonious development of the productive forces within the framework of capitalism, if it was therefore possible steadily and continuously to raise the living standards of the masses despite the private ownership of the means of production, then it was impossible to speak of socialism as an objective necessity. At most, it might be argued that the socialist organization of society was superior to capitalism on moral grounds, but that is very different from saying that the irrepressible anarchy of capitalist production leads to economic and political crises of such magnitude that the survival of human civilization depends upon the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order and the reorganization of the economy along socialist lines.

This controversy, therefore, contained within it the most profound political implications for the Marxist movement. An objective determination of the type of political party required by the working class depends, in the final analysis, on the nature of the capitalist system. If, as Bernstein argued, the organic tendency of capitalist development leads toward a steady improvement in the condition of the working class; and if, as the outcome of this process of gradual improvement, the elements of social exploitation wither away, then, one must acknowledge that the reformist perspective rests on solid ground. However, if the objective nature of capitalist society is such that the reforms are, at best, limited and sterile palliatives that in no fundamental way alter the fact of economic exploitation of the many by the few; and if a working class political party, in the course of limiting its efforts to the reform of capitalism, distracts the masses from the real dangers that arise out of the objective contradictions of the system; and if, as those dangers mount, the workers party devotes itself to dampening the militancy of the masses rather than preparing them for the revolutionary implications of the developing crisis, then that party is perpetrating a gross and terrible political deception. And that proved to be the role and fate of the German Social Democracy and the Second International as a whole.

To understand the significance of Lenin’s work, and of the Bolshevik Party that he created, it is necessary to study them within the context of the theoretical and political issues generated by the Bernstein controversy. More clearly than any other Marxist of his time, he systematically identified and worked through the far-ranging theoretical, political and practical implications of Bernstein’s revisionism. It must be understood that What Is To Be Done?, the book in which Lenin presented his fullest exposition of his conception of the fundamental tasks of the revolutionary party, was written in response to the position of the Economists, the Russian tendency identified with the views of Bernstein.

Like every truly creative and original work, What Is To Be Done? "operates" on many different levels. It is generally described as a manual for the organization of a revolutionary party. But the significance of this work goes far beyond its organizational precepts. The central issue that underlies Lenin’s treatment of many different facets of political work is that of historical perspective. It may sound somewhat trivial and obvious to say that Lenin was focused on the problem of what it meant for a party to be revolutionary. But it should be kept in mind that at the turn of the century a substantial section of so-called socialists, influenced by Bernstein, maintained that the term "revolutionary" did not, in practical terms, mean very much at all.

Let us review this point again. Bernstein and his followers—especially within the leadership of the trade unions—had arrived at the position that socialism, to the extent that it could be conceived of as a practical reality, was the product of the gradual perfection of capitalism and bourgeois society. The "socialist" party contributed to this gradual perfection by working for the expansion of working class rights within an economic and social order that was becoming less exploitative and capable of steadily accommodating the demands of the working class for an improvement in its social and political position. The party leaders, concentrating their efforts, along with their associates in the trade union hierarchy, on the organization and administration of this gradualist movement for incremental social progress, could leave the "final goal"—socialism—to take care of itself, inasmuch as this "final goal" could hardly be envisioned in the foreseeable future, let alone thought of as being bound up with any specific economic and political events that were likely to arise.

Lenin, however, had carefully pondered and considered the implications of the Marxian perspective. He was deeply and unshakably convinced that the realization of socialism was bound up with a historical catastrophe that was being prepared, even as he worked, by the accumulating contradictions of the capitalist system. The catastrophe, for Lenin, was not some distant and mythical apocalypse: it was the unfolding reality of an economic order which, even in the midst of its most explosive growth, was becoming increasingly unstable. The actual form that this catastrophe would assume could not be predicted exactly. There were, in the early years of the twentieth century, reasons to believe that the catastrophe would assume the political form of a major clash between the principal imperialist powers of Europe. However, whatever the timetable of the unfolding catastrophe or the precise forms of its realization, its objective development out of the actual contradictions of capitalism had to be taken as the basis of political work.

Thus, the real life of the Marxist party consisted in the preparation of a political vanguard for the consequences and demands of this catastrophe. All the different experiences of the revolutionary party, in many different forms of work, were, however mundane they may have superficially appeared, political rehearsals for the main event. For Lenin was convinced that the objective development of the contradictions of the capitalist system would place, as a practical matter, the problem of the conquest of power on the agendas of the political parties of the working class. In short, the task of the revolutionary party was to prepare, both the working class and itself, for the revolution.

In reviewing this controversy, is it possible to determine who was right? Does the question of objective truth arise in relation to the study of this historical experience? Here we must examine the opposing perspectives and political conceptions in the light of further historical developments. Bernstein placed his faith in the prospect that capitalism, as it entered the twentieth century, possessed enormous reservoirs of progressive potential. The scientific and technological revolutions had created a modern industrial system with unlimited productive power. The abolition of poverty, first in the advanced countries and gradually throughout the world, was only a matter of time. As for the exploitative tendencies of capitalist society, these were more the product of the ignorant greed of individual businessmen than the manifestation of organic and irrepressible tendencies. At any rate, to the extent that such tendencies did exist, they could be mitigated by the collective pressure of a well-organized trade union movement, with the supplemental support of progressive political parties composed of people of good will.

There was no reason to believe that capitalism was heading toward any sort of economic or political catastrophe. Bernstein referred sarcastically to an affliction he called "socialist catastrophitis." He could hardly understand how, after several decades of steady progress on the basis of bourgeois democracy and the vast increase in the material well-being of European society, the socialist movement could still take seriously the prospect of a catastrophe. Even the dangers of militarism seemed, to Bernstein, terribly exaggerated. "Fortunately," he wrote, "we are increasingly becoming accustomed to settle political differences in ways other than by the use of firearms." But history had many terrible surprises in store for the twentieth century. In 1914, the catastrophe that supposedly could not happen, did. The economic and political antagonisms based on imperialist rivalries finally erupted. Whatever the immediate motives and aims of the belligerents, World War I was, in the final analysis, the expression of the irrepressible contradiction between the world economy that had taken shape during the final decades of the nineteenth century and the nation-state system.

The outbreak of the war exposed within hours the political worthlessness of revisionism. The parties and organizations that had for years based their practical work on its philistine and complacent conceptions of gradual social reform were taken unaware and proved utterly incapable of responding in a revolutionary manner to the sudden sharp change in political conditions. They became, overnight, open and shameless supporters of their capitalist governments. The slogans of revolutionary internationalism and the solidarity of the working class were forgotten.

In the months and years that followed the outbreak of war in August 1914, Europe experienced a descent into barbarism that was without precedent. Millions of young men lived in muddy trenches, with rats, mice and lice as their constant companions, and devoted their energies to killing each other by the hundreds of thousands. On the first day of the ill-fated Somme offensive, 60,000 British soldiers lost their lives. The battle of Verdun cost one million casualties. One in three French soldiers was killed or wounded. By the time the war was over, the French people had lost 20 percent of their men of military age. A half million British youth under the age of 30 lost their lives. The Germans lost about a million. Russia, between the outbreak of the war and the outbreak of revolution in 1917, lost nearly 2 million.

Of all the political parties that had been affiliated to the Second International, only one proved itself fully equal to the test of 1914 and the subsequent revolutionary convulsions, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin. The years of political preparation on the basis of a revolutionary perspective, the ceaseless efforts to clarify the program and tasks of the revolutionary organization, the painstaking care with which Lenin sought to define the independent interests of the working class and distinguish its standpoint from that of all other political forces, from the bourgeois liberals to the radical petty bourgeoisie— all this work had produced a party that was able to respond in a revolutionary fashion to the revolutionary crisis of 1917.

One of the staples of anti-Marxist literature is that the Russian Revolution was a putsch, or coup d’état, engineered by a handful of ruthless malcontents who were determined to impose a totalitarian dictatorship upon the people. According to this argument, the Bolshevik Party was nothing more than a tiny sect prior to 1917, and it came to power only because it was able to exploit the mass confusion created by the revolution.

As the Harvard University historian Richard Pipes has told us, no one wanted a revolution except a handful of intellectual malcontents, and the Bolsheviks lacked support even within the working class.

Over the past decade a number of historians have attempted to paint a more detailed picture of the Russian working class and its political life prior to 1917. The best of these works give us a better sense of what was going on among the masses, and show that the Bolsheviks had established, well before 1917, a commanding political presence within the Russian working class. Indeed, by 1914 the Mensheviks, who had held strong positions within the popular organizations of the working class, were in headlong retreat before the surging Bolsheviks.

I will attempt to give a brief overview of the political development of the Russian working class in the decade that preceded the conquest of power by the Bolsheviks. The defeat of the 1905 revolution resulted in a staggering decline in the numerical strength and political influence of the revolutionary organizations. In the years of revolutionary upsurge, between 1905 and 1907, both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks— the two antagonistic factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP)—had grown by tens of thousands. After June 1907, their mass membership faded away. The impact of defeat produced widespread demoralization. Revolutionary politics and aspirations were abandoned even by activists who had devoted years to the struggle. The drift among broad sections of the Russian intelligentsia back to religion and the flourishing of all sorts of backward attitudes, including a fascination with pornography, found its reflection within the membership of the revolutionary movement. By 1910, according to Trotsky, Lenin’s loyal and active contacts within Russia numbered about 10 people.

However, this was not an entirely futile period. There were immense difficulties, but both Lenin and Trotsky, despite their often bitter disagreements, were analyzing the events of 1905 and drawing far-reaching conclusions. For Trotsky, the 1905 revolution demonstrated that the democratic revolution in Russia could be led only by the working class, and that under the leadership of the working class the democratic revolution would assume an increasingly socialistic direction. This insight into the sociopolitical dynamics of the Russian Revolution laid the basis for the elaboration of the theory of permanent revolution.

For Lenin, the experiences of 1905 led to a deepening of his analysis of the differences between Bolshevism and Menshevism. They thereby shed new light on the significance of the split in the socialist workers movement. The tactics employed by the Mensheviks throughout the 1905 revolution confirmed Lenin’s belief that Menshevism represented an opportunist current that reflected the influence of the liberal bourgeoisie on the working class. The development of a revolutionary movement, Lenin insisted, required the persistent deepening of the struggle to expose before the working class this essential political characteristic of Menshevism.

Under the leadership of the shrewd Prime Minister, Stolypin, the czarist regime enjoyed, after the close call of 1905, a revival of its political fortunes. However the assassination of Stolypin in 1911, which was the outcome of a plot organized by the secret police, removed the czar’s most capable minister just as the workers movement entered into a new phase of radical activity. The outbreak of mass strikes in 1912 brought about a new political climate, which saw a rapid growth in Bolshevik influence.

The period of reaction, from 1907 to 1912, produced a sharp turn to the right among the Mensheviks. Drawing their inspiration from what was, in fact, the weakest side of German Social Democracy—that is, the domination of the German party by the reformist trade unions—the Mensheviks moved into the political orbit of the bourgeois liberals, and their aspirations assumed a quite definite reformist coloration. During the period of reaction, the Mensheviks benefited from their ties with the bourgeois liberal Cadets. But with the renewed upsurge of the working class from 1912 on, the Bolsheviks began to overtake them, even in the trade unions once dominated by the Mensheviks.

One of the most significant indications of the political radicalization of the working class came in April 1913, at a meeting of the Petersburg metal workers union. As we learn in Victoria Bonnell’s Roots of Rebellion, this organization had been dominated by the Mensheviks for several years. However, with 700 to 800 workers present, the meeting elected a Bolshevik majority to the union’s interim directing board.

In late August 1913, a second election was held for a permanent directing board. It was attended by between 1,800 to 3,000 workers out of a total union membership of 5,600. A Bolshevik directing board was elected, and the Mensheviks managed to obtain only about 150 votes. It must be stressed that the increasingly class-conscious workers of St. Petersburg were able to discern the different positions of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The latter opposed the involvement of the trade unions in struggles of an overtly political, revolutionary character. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, sought openly to utilize the unions for precisely such a purpose.

Throughout the remainder of 1913 and into 1914, the Bolsheviks continued to oust the Mensheviks from their dominant positions in the unions. Among the organized tailors, for example, the Bolsheviks achieved an overwhelming majority in the leadership by July 1914. Out of 11 board members, 10 were Bolsheviks and 1 was a Socialist-Revolutionary. The Mensheviks had lost all their support.

The printers, who were among the most skilled and educated workers, elected Bolshevik candidates in April 1914 to 9 of the 18 full seats on their board of directors and to 8 of the 12 candidate seats.

Another indication of the growth of the Bolsheviks’ support at the expense of the Mensheviks comes from the respective sizes of their press circulation. The Menshevik newspaper, Luch, had a press run of about 16,000 per issue. But Pravda, the Bolshevik daily, had a press run of 40,000.

By July 1914, on the eve of the war, the class struggle in the major industrial centers of Russia had assumed revolutionary dimensions. Incidents of street fighting between workers and police were reported in St. Petersburg. For the czarist regime the war came at an opportune moment. While the pressure of war led, over a period of three years, to an enormous intensification of social conflict, its initial impact was to douse the revolutionary workers movement with a tidal wave of chauvinist fervor. The highly developed Bolshevik organization, which had been operating under conditions of borderline legality, was shattered and again driven deep underground.

Trotsky was to write later that had it not been for the war, the eruption of revolution in late 1914 or 1915 would have meant a mass proletarian movement unfolding, from the beginning, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks. As it so happened, the revolution began in February 1917 under conditions that were far less favorable to the Bolsheviks than they had been in July 1914. First, their organization was barely functioning in Russia. A great number of their working class factory cadre had been drafted into the army and were dispersed along a wide front. The factories were now populated by far less politically experienced workers. Finally, the mass mobilization of the peasantry inside the army meant that when the revolution erupted, the proletarian character of the social movement, at least in its beginning stages, was far less pronounced than it had been in 1914. That is why the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, based largely on the peasantry, emerged out of the first weeks of the revolution as the largest political party.

However, despite their initial weakness, the Bolsheviks were not entirely without influence in the revolutionary events that brought about the collapse of the czarist regime in February-March 1917. As Trotsky explained so well in his monumental The History of the Russian Revolution, the uprising of February 1917 was not purely "spontaneous," i.e., without any trace of political leadership. Years of political agitation and education by the Bolsheviks and even the Mensheviks, at least to the extent that the general conceptions of Marxism found expression in the activities of the latter, had left their residue on the consciousness of St. Petersburg workers.

Every mass movement possesses a certain type or level of consciousness, and it is the product of a long history. There is a reason why the eruption of February 1917 led to the creation of soviets (workers councils) and assumed the form of a conscious political struggle against czarism, rather than of apolitical rioting and looting. Moreover, insofar as the war had not entirely destroyed the underground organization and eliminated their cadre from the factories, the Bolsheviks were still in a position to impart a more militant consciousness to the mass uprising of February 1917.

It must, however, be at least briefly noted that certain important contradictions in the Bolshevik program, which were the subject of the old disputes between Lenin and Trotsky, found expression in the confusion that prevailed inside the party prior to Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917. At any rate, taking all this into account, we agree with, and contemporary historical research substantiates, Trotsky's assertion that the February Revolution was led by "conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin."

As I’ve already noted, the most common assertion of the reactionary historians is that the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was the outcome of a sinister conspiracy organized and carried out behind the backs of the Russian people, including the working class, in whose name the revolution was made. To understand how the greatest revolution in history arose as the product of such a conspiracy, one must refer once again to the work of our learned friend from Harvard University, the indefatigable Richard Pipes:

"Lenin was a very secretive man: although he spoke and wrote voluminously, enough to fill fifty-five volumes of collected works, his speeches and writings are overwhelmingly propaganda and agitation, meant to persuade potential followers and destroy known opponents rather than reveal his thoughts. He rarely disclosed what was on his mind, even to close associates. As supreme commander in the global war between classes, he kept his plans private. To reconstruct his thinking, it is necessary, therefore, to proceed retroactively, from known deeds to concealed intentions" (The Russian Revolution [New York: Vintage Books,1991], p. 394).

Consider this. To produce 55 volumes of political literature, each volume between 300 and 500 pages, means that Lenin, in the course of his 30-year political career, had an average annual written output of between 600 and 1,000 pages (in printed form). This output included economic studies, philosophical tracts, political treatises, resolutions, newspaper commentaries and articles, extensive professional and personal correspondence, innumerable memoranda and private notes, such as the Philosophical Notebooks, which enable us to follow the intellectual development of Lenin’s conceptions. Much of Lenin’s working day, for years on end, was spent at the writing desk. And yet all this writing, according to Pipes, was nothing more than the means by which Lenin skillfully concealed what he was really thinking! That he neither wrote nor even communicated orally to his closest associates and co-conspirators.

It must be pointed out that Pipes’s indictment of Lenin utilizes the very method employed by Stalin in the organization of the frame-up of Leon Trotsky and the Old Bolsheviks during the Moscow Trials of the 193Os. There it was asserted that the public writings and statements of Trotsky over a period of several decades, including the years when he stood at the leadership of the Red Army, were merely a cover for his secret decades-long conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union. The "investigative methods" of Stalin and the celebrated Harvard historian—described by Pipes himself as the retroactive movement "from known deeds to concealed intentions"—calls to mind the juridical procedures of a medieval witch trial.

As for the specific allegation that Lenin somehow kept his thoughts to himself as he "plotted" the secret overturn of the Provisional Government, it is hard to take this argument seriously. One must bear in mind that throughout 1917 Lenin exercised his influence upon the Bolshevik Party and the working class to a great extent, at times almost entirely, through the written word. Indeed, it was a written document, known unpretentiously as the "April Theses," that decisively changed party policy following Lenin’s return from exile and set the Bolsheviks on the road to power. Later, between July and October 1917, he was in hiding and depended on the force of his written arguments to influence the Bolshevik Party. Lenin could hardly have overcome the powerful resistance inside the Bolshevik Party leadership to his call for the overthrow of the Provisional Government had it not been for the influence he exerted upon the party’s mass membership through the medium of his writings. John Reed recognized the unique character of Lenin’s authority when he wrote in his famous Ten Days That Shook the World that Lenin was one of the very few practical political leaders in world history who had become the leader of masses on the basis of his intellectual powers.

Much could be said about the development of Bolshevik policy during that critical year. But the conspiracy theory favored by Pipes and so many others is most convincingly refuted by historical research carried out by serious scholars who have unearthed a wealth of factual information about the extraordinary scope and power of the mass working class movement upon which the Bolshevik bid for power was based. A careful study of this material leads one to the conclusion that the conquest of power by the Bolshevik Party was anything but the outcome of a putsch prepared in the back room of a safe house in Petrograd. If anything, the Bolshevik Party spent much of the year trying to keep pace with a mass movement that possessed a dynamic momentum whose equal had not been seen since the French Revolution. What occurred in Russia in 1917 was the political equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.

If Mr. Pipes does not like history books that concentrate on the facts, it is because he does not like what the facts indicate. And what a careful examination of the facts of 1917 show is that the final victory of the Bolshevik Party was based on a powerful and consciously anticapitalist movement of the working class in the major industrial centers of Russia.

Permit me to review a few essential facts relating to the size and composition of the Russian working class on the eve of the February Revolution. According to The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution, there were approximately 3.5 million workers in the factories and mines of Russia. There were another million and a quarter workers located in transport and construction. The actual number of people who might be classified as wage workers comprised 10 percent of the population, or about 18.5 million.

Petrograd was a great industrial center whose environs were the home of 417,000 industrial workers. Of these, about 270,000 were metal workers. Fifty thousands workers were employed in the textile industry and 50,000 in the chemical industry. The other great industrial center of Russia was Moscow, with about 420,000 workers, one-third of whom were textile workers and one-quarter, metal workers.

There were also great concentrations of industrial workers in the Urals, the Ukraine, whose Donbass region employed approximately 280,000 workers, the Baltic region, Transcaucasia and Siberia.

Still, relative to the size of the entire population, the working class was numerically small. However, it was highly concentrated. Over 70 percent of the workers in Petrograd were employed in enterprises consisting of more than 1,000 workers. Two-thirds of Ukrainian workers were in enterprises that employed more than 500 workers. It was the same in the Urals.

Before Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917, the Bolshevik Party leadership in the capital had adopted a policy of giving conditional support to the bourgeois Provisional Government, including its continuation of the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, on the grounds that the revolution could not leap over the bourgeois democratic stage of its development. Lenin opposed this policy from its earliest days, while he was still in Switzerland and unable to intervene directly in the deliberations of the party leadership. The editorial board of Pravda, which was led by Stalin, actually refused to publish statements by Lenin which took strong exception to the conciliatory policies of the Bolshevik Party. Not until Lenin returned was he able, in the course of several weeks of bitter factional struggle, to overcome the initial policy. Of course, it must be understood that Lenin was fighting to change a programmatic position that he himself had developed and then defended for many years. To the Old Bolsheviks whom he now attacked, Lenin’s new line—calling for the preparation of the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the assumption of power by the working class—seemed a heretical capitulation to the theory of permanent revolution that had been propounded by Leon Trotsky, in opposition to the Bolsheviks, for a decade.

And this was certainly true. Lenin had come, by his own route, to the perspective with which Leon Trotsky had been so prominently identified. The experience of the World War, refracted through his own study of modern imperialism, had led Lenin to conclude that the Russian Revolution was the beginning of a world socialist revolution; that the international crisis of capitalism, interacting with the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie and its subordination to international capital, left open no possibility of a progressive bourgeois democratic stage of Russian development; and that the only class capable of breaking Russia’s subordination to imperialism and carrying through the essential democratic tasks of the revolution was the proletariat. On this basis Lenin presented in the "April Theses" the call for the transfer of state power to the workers soviet.

The tension within the Bolsheviks during the April discussion was intensified by the fact that inner-party discussions were no longer confined to a small circle of underground revolutionaries. Every delegate at the party conferences represented, in one way or another, broad social forces, whose pressure was hardly of an abstract character. As the actual membership of the party began to grow rapidly, the inner-party struggle both involved and was followed by significant strata of the working class.

The British historian Steve Smith has argued that Lenin’s "April Theses" had a direct and powerful impact on the consciousness of the most advanced sections of the Petrograd working class, particularly in the Vyborg district and on Vasil’evskii Island. Smith offers as evidence a resolution passed by general assemblies of workers at the Puzyrev and Ekval’ factories during the "April Days"—that is, the first great working class demonstrations against the Provisional Government:

"The government cannot and does not want to represent the wishes of the whole toiling people, and so we demand its immediate abolition and the arrest of its members, in order to neutralize their assault on liberty. We recognize that power must belong only to the people itself, i.e., to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldliers’ Deputies as the sole institution of authority enjoying the confidence of the people" (Daniel H. Kaiser, ed., The Workers’ Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View From Below [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 66).

Leon Trotsky wrote in his History of the Russian Revolution that the principal feature of a revolution is "the direct intervention of the masses in historic events." This intervention manifested itself, in the first instance, in the participation of masses of people in the stormy events of February 1917. The size of the crowds that gathered on the streets of Petrograd exceeded anything that had previously been seen, at least since the French Revolution.

Despite the efforts of the representatives of the bourgeoisie, such as Milyukov, and the moderate leaders of the soviet to reestablish order beneath the banner of the Provisional Government as quickly as possible, the events of February unleashed a burst of popular democratic creativity. The factory and work committees that were formed in Petrograd and throughout Russia were the practical expression of the determination of the proletariat to assert its power and reorganize society along anticapitalist lines.

Factory committees evolved quickly into complex structures involved in virtually every aspect of daily life. They formed subcommittees that were responsible for the security of their factories, food supply, culture, health and safety, the improvement of working conditions, and the maintenance of labor discipline through the discouragement of drunkenness.

As the revolution deepened, the committees became increasingly preoccupied with the organization and control of production. The Blackwell Encyclopedia cites the work of a Soviet historian, Z. V. Stepanov, who "counted 4,266 acts by 124 factory committees in Petrograd between 1 March and 25 October and calculates that 1,141 acts related to workers control of production and distribution; 882 concerned organization questions; 347 concerned political questions; 299 concerned wages; 241 concerned hiring and firing and the monitoring of conscription" (Harold Shukman, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution [Oxford: Blackwell Reference,1994], p. 22).

By the late summer and autumn of 1917, the factory committees began to demand that the employers provide them with access to order books and financial accounts. By October some form of workers control was in effect in 573 factories and mines, with a combined work force of 1.4 million workers.

Throughout 1917 the Bolsheviks developed enormous strength within the factory committees. Well before the Bolsheviks obtained a majority inside the Petrograd Soviet, they were in the leadership of the most important factory committees. A study of the resolutions passed by local assemblies shows that there was a broad-based and enthusiastic response to the slogans and principal demands of the Bolshevik Party. In Moscow, which was less developed politically than Petrograd, the month of October 1917 saw more than 50,000 workers pass resolutions in support of the Bolshevik demand for the transfer of power to the soviets; and there is overwhelming evidence that the Bolshevik seizure of power was welcomed by a large majority of the working class.

We are given an idea of the mood of the working class in October 1917 in the study of developments at the textile center of Ivanova-Kineshma, 250 miles northeast of Moscow, by the historian David Mandel. Strong support for the Bolsheviks predated the outbreak of revolution. By October 1917 it had become overwhelming. If anything, workers in Ivanova-Kineshma expressed impatience with the slow pace of Bolshevik activity in Petrograd. When a Bolshevik orator, in a speech to the Kineshma Soviet in late September 1917, posed the rhetorical question: "History calls on us to take power ... Are we ready?," a voice from the audience replied, "We have been ready for a long time now, but we don't know why they are still asleep in the center" (Frankel, Frankel and Knei-paz, eds., Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], p. 160).

Even if one is inclined to treat such historical anecdotes skeptically—they sound almost too good to be true—there is no doubt about the reality of the objective process they are intended to illustrate. Between April and October, the Bolshevik Party experienced a phenomenal growth. In April 1917 the Petrograd organization of the Bolsheviks consisted of about 16,000 workers. By October its membership had risen to 43,000, of whom two-thirds were workers. In June 1917 the elections to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets produced 283 Socialist-Revolutionary delegates, 248 Menshevik delegates and only 105 Bolshevik delegates. The elections to the Second All-Russian Congress, which assembled on the eve of the October Revolution four months later, produced an astonishing transformation: the Bolsheviks’ share of the delegates rose to 390, the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ share fell to 160 and the Mensheviks, to 72.

Workers repeatedly changed their political affiliations in the course of the revolution, generally moving to the left as they became increasingly disgusted with the Provisional Government and the refusal of the moderate socialist parties to break with it. As the historian Tim McDaniel has pointed out, "Economic crisis, the continuation of war, the acceleration of class conflict, and the Kornilov putsch transformed the vast majority of politically active workers into enemies of the Provisional Government in its various incarnations.... They came to see no essential distinction between the new government and the old czarist regime, except that the Provisional Government was now more clearly a ‘bourgeois dictatorship"’ (Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism and Revolution in Russia [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 355).

The letter of a worker who had been a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party to a Bolshevik newspaper reflects the shifts in the political mood during 1917:

"Because of profound misunderstanding I joined the SR party, which has now passed to the side of the bourgeoisie and lent a hand to our exploiters. So that I shall not be nailed to this mast of shame, I am quitting the ranks of the chauvinists. As a conscious proletarian, I am joining the Bolshevik comrades, who alone are the genuine defenders of the oppressed" (Kaiser, The Workers’ Revolution in 1917, pp. 7 3-74).

Of course, the radicalization of the working class in 1917 was not, by far, a homogeneous process without its own complex contradictions. Even in areas where the strength of the Bolsheviks grew rapidly, as among the Donbass miners, they also encountered opposition. There were times when they were the victims of sharp shifts in the moods of workers. And yet, for all the complexities of this process, upon which the most serious historians have shed, in contrast to Mr. Pipes, considerable light, there is no question that the October Revolution was the outcome of a massive and politically-conscious movement of the working class.

Summing up the results of his research into the causes of the Bolshevik victory, Professor Steve Smith has written:

"[T]he Bolsheviks themselves did not create popular discontent or revolutionary feeling. This grew out of the masses’ own experiences of complex economic and social upheavals and political events. The contribution of the Bolsheviks was rather to shape workers’ understanding of the social dynamic of the revolution and to foster an awareness of how the urgent problems of daily life related to the broader social and political order. The Bolsheviks won support because their analysis and proposed solutions seemed to make sense. A worker from the Orudiinyi workers, formerly a bastion of defensism where Bolsheviks were not even allowed to speak, stated in September that ‘the Bolsheviks have always said: "It is not we who will persuade you, but life itself." And now the Bolsheviks have triumphed because life has proved their tactics right"’ (ibid., p. 77).

More than a half-century ago, when there still existed an American intelligentsia that believed in the possibility of human progress and was capable of reflecting intelligently, even if not entirely sympathetically, on the meaning of the Russian Revolution, there appeared an interesting and influential book by the literary critic Edmund Wilson entitled To the Finland Station. I do not know how well this work or Wilson’s other major opus, Axel's Castle, has withstood the onslaught of the post-modernists, the post post-modernists, and the radical multiculturalists. Whatever the state of play on the campuses, both works certainly deserve to be read. At any rate, Wilson, notwithstanding his own patrician distrust of the masses in revolution and his pragmatic disdain for dialectics, argued that Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in April 1917 marked a high point in man’s struggle to make himself the unfettered master of his own social development.

"The point is," wrote Wilson, "that western man at this moment can be seen to have made some definite progress in mastering the greeds and the fears, the bewilderments, in which he has lived" (Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station [London: Macmillan Publishers, 1983], p. 472).

With this assessment, from which Wilson was later, under the pressure of McCarthyism, to retreat, we can heartily agree. The Russian Revolution still represents the highest point in the conscious efforts of humanity to assume control of its own destiny, to eliminate from its social existence all that represents, in one form or another, the domination of uncomprehended forces of nature and unconscious history over human development.

Marxism did not introduce into the world a new set of utopian conceptions. It recognized the objectively existing potential for changing history within the social forces that had been created by history itself. It discovered within a real existing social force, the working class, the objective basis for ending the historically-evolved forms of class oppression. The oppression of the proletariat by the capitalist class had to be ended not simply because it was, in the conventional sense of the term, morally wrong; but because this oppression had become a fetter on the progressive development of human society itself. Precisely herein lay the essential immorality of capitalist oppression.

Marxism introduced into the working class an understanding of the historical process of which it was a part; and thereby transformed this class from an object of history into its conscious subject. The education of the working class on the basis of Marxism began in 1847. The October Revolution, 70 years later, was the outcome of this great process of modal enlightenment.

For reasons which must be studied and assimilated, the Russian Revolution suffered a tremendous setback. But this fact by no means invalidates the enduring significance and relevance of the events of 1917.

See also:
Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the 20th Century: A lecture by David North

Was there an alternative to Stalinism in the USSR? A lecture by David North

Russia and the former Soviet Union: Other WSWS historical features

1. Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronstein; 1879-1940): co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 revolution; founder of the Fourth International. Trotsky joined the revolutionary movement in 1898 and collaborated with Lenin on Iskra in London in 1902-3. As president of the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) soviet in the 1905 revolution, he was prosecuted by the czarist autocracy but escaped from prison in Siberia and continued revolutionary work in Europe and America. Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and was appointed chief organizer of the October insurrection, first commissar for foreign affairs and leader of the Soviet Red Army. In 1923 he formed the Left Opposition to fight the developing Soviet bureaucracy. Expelled from the CPSU in 1927 he was deported to Turkey in 1929. In 1933 he called for the formation of a new communist international—the Fourth International—which was founded in 1938. Trotsky was murdered on Stalin's orders by GPU agent Ramon Mercader in August 1940 in Mexico. [back]

2. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (Ulyanov) (1870-1924): leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the first Soviet state. Lenin’s main contribution to Marxism was his theory of the revolutionary vanguard party, the political instrument through which the proletariat would overthrow capitalism and take state power. In What is to be Done? (1902) he emphasized that scientific socialism had to be brought into the labor movement from outside the day-to-day economic struggles and in a conflict with the spontaneously formed bourgeois consciousness of the working class. Lenin defended dialectical materialism, the science of Marxism, in Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908) and the Philosophical Notebooks. [back]

After the betrayal of the Second International in August 1914, he set out to construct a Third (Communist) International. In April 1917 he politically rearmed the Bolshevik Party and, together with Trotsky, organized the October 1917 insurrection. Shortly before his death Lenin initiated a struggle against the developing Soviet bureaucracy and called for the removal of Stalin as party secretary. [back]

3. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831): German philosopher and great dialectical idealist precursor of Marx. Hegel began his academic career at Jena in 1801 and became professor of philosophy in 1805. In 1818 he was appointed head of philosophy at the University of Berlin, a position he held until his death. An ardent supporter of the French Revolution, Hegel wrote on logic, ethics, history, religion and aesthetics. His chief works were Phenomenology of the Mind (1807), Science of Logic (1812-1816), History of Philosophy (1817) and Philosophy of Right (1821). In philosophy he took apart the old formal logic and reconstructed it on dialectical foundations. His dialectical logic, a revolutionary advance in human thought, is still attacked by many bourgeois philosophers. [back]

4. Marx, Karl (1818-1883): leading proletarian revolutionist of the nineteenth century. Marx was, together with Frederick Engels (1820-1895), the founder of scientific socialism and a lifelong participant in the struggle to make the international working class conscious of its historic role. He co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Engels and spent decades researching and writing Capital, the definitive analysis of the objective laws of capitalism. He played a central role in the establishment of the First International, the International Workingmen s Association in 1864 and produced numerous revolutionary-critical analyses of the decisive class struggles of the nineteenth century. These include: The Class Struggle in France, 1848-1850, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France. [back]

5. Bernstein, Eduard (1850-1932) leading theoretician of opportunist tendency in the German Social Democratic Party at the end of the nineteenth century; forefather of modern revisionism. In his early political career, Bernstein worked closely with Frederick Engels and acted as his literary executor after his death. Exiled from Germany from 1878 to 1911, Bernstein edited party newspapers in Zurich and London. In the late 1890s, he began revising fundamental socialist principles. He denied the validity of the Marxist theory of the collapse of capitalism and claimed socialism would he achieved through parliamentary action and capitalist reform. Bernstein’s book, Evolutionary Socialism, later known as The Preconditions of Socialism, was attacked by Luxemburg, Kautsky and other Marxists in the SPD. Although the SPD formally rejected his analysis at the 1899 and 1901 congresses, Bernstein’s reformist theories animated the daily work of many SPD union leaders and parliamentary deputies. During World War I Bernstein joined with Kautsky and Hilferding to form the centrist USPD. He later rejoined the SPD. [back]

6. The Fabians: a petty-bourgeois, opportunist trend in the British labor movement. Established in 1884, the Fabian Society took its name from the ancient Roman commander Fabius Maximus (275-203 BC), famous for harassing Hannibal’s army without risking a full-scale battle. The Fabians denied the need for class struggle by the proletariat and opposed social revolution, claiming that socialism could only be achieved through the accumulation of social reforms. Well-known Fabians included George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and H.G. Wells. [back]

7. Paris Commune: revolutionary government established by the proletarian uprising in Paris on March 18, 1871. The Commune, the first example in history of proletarian dictatorship, was established following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. It existed for 73 days, until May 28, 1871, when it was cruelly suppressed by the bourgeoisie led by Adolphe Thiers. Thiers made an agreement with the Prussians, who still occupied some forts outside Paris, to release hundreds of French military prisoners of war to help crush the workers movement. An estimated 100,000 communards and their supporters were killed, executed and imprisoned by Thiers. Marx and Engels concluded from the experience of the Commune that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’ The bourgeois state would have to be smashed. [back]

8. Second International: established in 1889 by uniting the Social Democratic Parties, particularly throughout Europe As successor to the First International, the Second International was a powerful force in European international politics. It strongest and most authoritative section was the German Social Democratic Party; leading figures were August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky and Jean Jaures. While formally defending the revolutionary perspective of Marxism, the Second International more and more adapted to the growth of the capitalist nation-state. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the majority of its parties aligned themselves with the bourgeoisie of their respective nations and the organization collapsed. Following the war it was resuscitated to defend capitalism and suppress the working class. [back]

9. Plekhanov, Georgi (1856-1918): founder of the Marxist movement in Russia. Plekhanov severed ties with the Russian populists in 1879 and left Russia in 1880. In exile he formed the first Russian Marxist organization, the League for the Emancipation of Labor (1883), and helped organize the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (1898). In 1900 he collaborated with Lenin in publishing the newspaper Iskra (The Spark). After the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party Labor Party (1903) he adopted a conciliatory attitude towards revisionism and later joined the Mensheviks. He returned to Russia at the time of the February Revolution in 1917, but opposed the seizure of power in October. Plekhanov died in a Finnish tuberculosis sanitarium in 1918. [back]

10. Luxemburg, Rosa (1870-1919): founder of the Polish Social Democratic Party; prominent opponent of revisionism and opportunism in the German Social Democratic Party and Second International before World War I. Jailed in 1915 for her opposition to World War I, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht organized the Spartakusbund, which later became the Communist Party of Germany. Freed by the revolution of November 1918, Luxemburg helped lead the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919. This was crushed and she and Liebknecht were assassinated on the orders of Gustav Noske, Social Democratic minister of war in the Ebert-Scheidemann government. [back]

11. Permanent Revolution: theory of world socialist revolution elaborated by Leon Trotsky. As Trotsky explained in the 1922 preface to his account of the 1905 revolution, permanent revolution "defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with bourgeois aims could not stop short at these aims; the revolution could not solve its immediate, bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat into power. And the proletariat, once having power in its hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations. While doing so it would enter into hostile conflict, not only with those bourgeois groups which had supported it during the first stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses of the peasantry, with whose collaboration it—the proletariat—had come into power.

"The contradictions between a workers government and an overwhelming majority of peasants in a backward country could be resolved only on an international scale, in the arena of a world proletarian revolution. Having, by virtue of historical necessity, burst the narrow bourgeois-democratic confines of the Russian revolution, the victorious proletariat would be compelled also to burst its national and state confines, that is to say, it would have to strive consciously for the Russian revolution to become a prologue to a world revolution." [back]

12. Wilson, Edmund (1895-1972): US critic and writer who investigated the historical, sociological and psychological background to literature. Initially sympathetic to the Communist Party, Wilson, after visiting the Soviet Union in 1935, became disillusioned with the CP, gravitated towards Trotskyism and was loosely associated with the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review. In 1936 he declared that the Moscow Trials were concocted by the Stalinist regime "to divert attention from more fundamental problems." "Trotsky, in the publicity of the Soviet Union," Wilson said, "is simply what the Jew is to the Nazis."

His prolific output includes: Axel's Castle (1931), a study of symbolism; To the Finland Station (1940) on the intellectual sources of the Russian Revolution; The Wound and the Bow (1941) on neurosis and literature; and Patriotic Gore (1962), a study of American Civil War literature. [back]