Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (22 page)

A whole host of Leninist themes poured out in the theses. Soviets should take the lead. In an easy phrase to write but a concept that was much more difficult to realize, Lenin called for ‘Abolition of the police, army and bureaucracy’, that is the smashing of the existing state machine. It was the greatest of ironies, and one of the most profound historical processes for us to analyse, that the system Lenin created was characterized precisely by its police, army and bureaucracy.

On the land question he called for ‘Confiscation of all landed estates’ and followed this with a proposal for ‘Nationalisation of
all
lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.’ Large estates should not be broken up but maintained by the local soviets as model farms. We will return to the deeper implications of this crucial point, but for the moment we can see several immediate ones. The peasants’ desire to take over estates should be resisted. Their land, too, should be taken over – in order to equalize ‘rich’ ‘kulak’ and poor peasant holdings. The model farms should show the advantages of large-scale over small-scale farming as beacons guiding the peasants to their more productive future. Lenin certainly did not envisage peasant farming as anything other than a brake on Russia’s progress. There were also concerns, spread across the whole political spectrum, that the large estates produced most of the surplus that fed the army and towns. To allow the peasants to take it over would endanger the food supply to the non-rural population since peasants would use much of the extra capacity to raise their own living standards rather than market the surplus. One should also note Lenin’s care not to put local soviets in the hands of the peasants as a whole but to put ‘the weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme’ on agricultural labourers and poor peasants who should be organized separately from each other and from wealthier peasants, the point being to further class struggle between different peasant groups. His discourse about class differentiation among peasants, going back to the 1890s, was still prominent in his approach to the peasant question, though he changed the nuances of it many times in the next five years.

Surprising to his audience, but not to us since we have seen him use the concept already, was his assertion that ‘It is not our
immediate
task to “introduce” socialism’. Instead, they should initially be satisfied with bringing ‘social production and the distribution of products at once under the
control
[that is, supervision] of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.’ Combining that with his previous point, about calling for the amalgamation of all banks into a single, national bank and control of that also to be exercised by the soviets, comprised the skimpy elements of Lenin’s economic policy or, more precisely, policy of economic transition which we will need to look at in much greater detail later. Suffice it to say, despite being a Marxist who understood the economy to be the foundation of the culture and politics of an era, Lenin’s theses were almost entirely political. His, in a sense, Bakuninist streak, of putting emphasis on political struggle and the destruction of the state, was more prominent than his economically ‘determinist’ Marxism.

Although these were the points which were most stressed by Lenin we must not overlook others which were made briefly and almost in passing. It was only point nine out of ten that referred to ‘Party tasks’ listed briefly as ‘convocation of a party congress’, ‘alteration of the party programme’ – especially when it came to the issues of imperialist war, the ‘commune state’, as he called it, and amendment of the minimum programme – and ‘change of the party’s name’. All these shared the implication that they would define the Leninist group, the Bolsheviks, more clearly not only against the Mensheviks but also, as the next point showed, against the whole array of defensist social democrats of the collapsed Second International. The final point, ‘a new international’ carried the same concern to the international arena, in other words made a clear division between a new ‘revolutionary international’ and the ‘
social-chauvinists
’ and the ‘Centre’ in which Lenin placed ‘Kautsky and co’. Incidentally, insertion of the word ‘fraternization’ in the first point, about the war, was also tied in with Lenin’s internationalist vision in that he saw contact across the front-lines as a way of building the international class solidarity he believed was being generated by the war. If Russian and German troops got together they would see they had no quarrel with each other and turn instead on their rulers. In practice, such expectations turned out to be naive.

Such were the main points of Lenin’s vision of revolutionary policy. They caused great hostility, not only among the usual suspects such as the Menshevik and SR right, but even within his own party which was not ready for such an apparently gung-ho approach. Many historians have also claimed Lenin was calling for a new revolution. However, there are certain signs, even within the text of the theses, that, for the moment at least, that was not so. Calling for ‘no support’ for the Provisional Government should be distinguished from calling for its overthrow. Elsewhere Lenin seemed to envisage a process which might take some time. Putting the ideas across would require ‘patient, systematic and persistent
explanation
’ of the errors of the masses. Similarly, ‘In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism … it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them.’ Finally, of course, he said it was not their ‘
immediate
task to “introduce” socialism’, only soviet supervision of production and distribution and of the banks. Arguably, this last point foresaw a radical political revolution preceding a transformation of the economy. It could be understood to imply left-wing political supervision of a, for the time being, continuing capitalist, market economy. In fact, it is hard to understand it any other way. In all these respects we need to think carefully about Lenin’s vision for the revolution, but we can assert that none of the principles of
The April Theses
was new. All of them arose organically from Lenin’s longer-term assumptions about the war and continued to envisage the transformation of the imperialist war into a Europe-wide revolutionary civil war. Had they had access to or read Lenin’s writings of 1905 and 1914–17 more carefully, his comrades should not have been so surprised. This leads us to the suspicion that even his closest comrades did not read Lenin’s latest writings as holy writ and went their own way within what they saw as the larger parameters of their political position. Lenin was right to focus on the need to overhaul the Party. When he arrived back he did not, in any real sense, have a party. It was vital to consolidate one.

FROM RETURN TO THE BRINK OF DISASTER – APRIL TO JULY

Whatever the interpretive nuances surrounding
The April Theses
one thing was beyond doubt. Lenin was back. A new value had entered into the revolutionary equation. The atmosphere of revolution was intoxicating after the leafy suburbia of Berne and Zurich. Krupskaya’s own description brilliantly captures the atmosphere of revolutionary festival in Petrograd.

Those who have not lived through the revolution cannot imagine its grand, solemn beauty. Red banners, a guard of honour of Kronstadt sailors, searchlights from the Fortress of Peter and Paul illuminating the road from the Finland Station to the Kshesinskaya mansion, armoured cars, a chain of working men and women guarding the road. [Krupskaya 297]

Dignitaries, including Soviet leaders Skobelev and Chkheidze, came out to meet Lenin in the tsar’s lounge at the station. Lenin, who had wondered if they would all be arrested when they returned, was ‘a little taken aback’ when approached by an army captain but it was only that he should take part in inspecting a guard of honour! Even at the station Lenin was already outlining his theses. At the Bolshevik headquarters, the commandeered mansion of the tsar’s one-time mistress, the ballet dancer Ksheshinskaya, he spoke to ‘a huge crowd of workers and soldiers’ which ‘surrounded the house’. [Krupskaya 297]

It was also a time of personal joy. That first evening Lenin and Krupskaya were squeezed into a room at Lenin’s sister Anna’s house in Shirokaya ulitsa (literally Broad Street) in the Petrogradskaya Storona region of the city. Another sister, Maria, was also living there. The members of this always-close family were once again being reunited and supporting one another. Krupskaya recalls that the children of the house hung a welcome banner, saying ‘Workers of the World Unite’ over her and Lenin’s bed. ‘I hardly spoke to Il’ich that night – there really were no words to express the experience, everything was understood without words.’ [Krupskaya 296] The happiness was, of course, tinged with sadness that Lenin’s mother, Maria, had failed to live through to this happy day by only eight months. As we have already mentioned, Lenin’s first duty on his first day back was to visit her and beloved Olga’s graves.

After that, it was straight into the fray. Lenin went to one of the revolutionary powerhouses, the Tauride Palace, former home of the Duma and current home of the Petrograd Soviet, first to report his journey officially to the Executive Committee of the Soviet and then, in one of the committee rooms, to meet Bolshevik delegates and, in effect, give them their instructions. He presented his ten theses to an increasingly bemused audience. ‘For the first few minutes our people were taken aback.’ [Krupskaya 297] That was putting it mildly. Lenin had dropped something of a bombshell.

Critics within and without the Party were not slow to join in. Lenin was particularly indignant that a former Bolshevik now defensist had accused him of ‘planting the banner of civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy’, [SW 2 16] which was more or less exactly what Lenin had wanted to do. There was also severe opposition within the Party. It was only three days later that his
Theses
appeared in
Pravda
followed the next day by an article by Kamenev criticizing him for upsetting the delicate balance and pointing out that the propositions were ‘the expression of Lenin’s private opinion’, not the official policy of any part of the Bolshevik Party. Kamenev was wasting his energy. The moment was fast approaching when Lenin’s private opinions were to weigh much more heavily than any Party resolution, but for the moment he had to make a great effort to get
The April Theses
accepted. In a letter, Lenin complained that the
Pravda
editorial board, which he himself joined on 19 April, had ‘wobbled towards “Kautskyism”’, a deviation he ‘hoped to correct’. [CW 36 444–5] Lenin bombarded the Party press and meetings with articles reiterating the themes of the wartime writings and
The April Theses
. In
Letters on Tactics
he criticized ‘Old Bolsheviks’ (incidentally launching a fateful phrase for many of his comrades) for repeating stale dogmas rather than reacting to new realities. Though he only mentioned Kamenev by name, most of the Party leadership in Petrograd – including Stalin and Kalinin – were implicated. As we have already had occasion to comment, the narrower the issue the more intense the debate and that certainly appears to be the case here. Even a close examination of the polemics seems to show a relatively small gap between the contending groups. Lenin’s opponents were mainly upset by his apparent desire to rush into a new, socialist phase of the revolution when they believed it was still necessary to consolidate the bourgeois phase. Lenin defended himself by saying that he had spelled out clearly that an immediate transition to socialism was not on the cards. Lenin summarized his key point as follows:

The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already become a reality (in a certain form and to a certain extent)
… ‘The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers Deputies’ – there you have the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ already accomplished in reality. This formula is already antiquated … A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, ‘Communist’ elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists, who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of ‘supporting’ the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government). [CW 24 44–5]

Some of Lenin’s supporting arguments were less than clear. What did it mean to say that ‘Bolshevik slogans and ideas
on the whole
have been con
firmed by history; but
concretely
things have worked out
differently
’? [CW 24 44] Such comments smack more of someone who has the greatest difficulty in admitting he was wrong in the slightest degree, certainly a characteristic of Lenin. However, the argument was notable for two modifications Lenin was already making to his original formulations in April. First, he began to talk about the existence of what he called ‘Dual Power’.

The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood we cannot advance
… What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing – the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. [CW 24 38]

The second modification was precisely the prominence Lenin was now giving to soldiers’ soviets. Before his return he had not thought about them. As soon as he got back the role of soldiers was obvious. Immediately Lenin had grasped the importance of incorporating soldiers into the revolutionary equation and, in fact, they were to prove in many ways the decisive force in 1917.