The Russian Revolution полностью

Lenin rejected the Menshevik-SR doctrine of a two-stage revolution and its corollary, dvoevlastie or dyarchy; he meant to topple the Provisional Government as soon as practicable and seize power. His remarkably keen political instinct—the flair possessed by every successful general—told him this could be done. He knew the liberal and socialist intelligentsia for what they were: “vegetarian tigers,” to borrow a phrase from Clemenceau, who for all their revolutionary cant were deathly afraid of political responsibility and incapable of exercising it even if handed to them. In this respect, he judged them like Nicholas II. He further realized that underneath the appearance of national unity and universal support of the Provisional Government there seethed powerful destructive forces which, fanned and properly directed, could bring down the ineffective democracy and carry him to power: shortages of goods in the cities, agrarian unrest, ethnic aspirations. To accomplish their objective, the Bolsheviks had to set themselves clearly apart from both the Provisional Government and the other socialist parties as the sole alternative to the status quo. In line with this reasoning, after returning to Russia, Lenin compelled his followers to abandon the conciliatory attitude toward the Provisional Government and any thought of merging with the Mensheviks.

In view of the immense popularity of democratic slogans, Lenin could not openly claim power on behalf of the Bolshevik Party: no one outside Bolshevik ranks, and very few within them, would have found this prospect acceptable. For this reason, with one brief interlude, throughout 1917 he called for power to be transferred to the soviets. This tactic may appear puzzling in view of the fact that until the fall of 1917 the Bolsheviks were a minority in the soviets, so that, on the face of it, the implementation of this program would have transferred power to the Mensheviks and SRs. But the Bolsheviks felt confident the latter would not stand in their way. Tsereteli, who of all the Menshevik leaders had the fewest illusions about their rivals, wrote that the Bolsheviks believed they would have little trouble wresting national power from the soviet majority.⁴³ From Lenin’s point of view the Provisional Government, for all its incompetence, was a more dangerous enemy than the democratic socialists because it had at its disposal a large armed force and because it enjoyed a certain measure of support from the peasantry and the middle class: by appealing to nationalism it could rally powerful forces against him. As long as the Provisional Government stayed in power, however nominally, the danger always existed of the country veering to the right. With the soviet as the locus of authority, it was a relatively simple matter to keep on radicalizing the political atmosphere and pulling the irresolute socialists along by frightening them with the specter of a “counterrevolution.”

Lenin pursued his objective—seizure of power—in a manner that was rooted in the study of military history and military science. Genuine politics, even in its authoritarian form, entails some sort of accommodation both with other contenders for power and with the population at large, which leaves the governed scope for free initiative. But Lenin, for whom politics was always class war, thought in Clausewitzian terms: its purpose, as that of military strategy, was not accommodation with the opponent but his destruction. This meant, first and foremost, disarming him, in two senses: (1) depriving him of an armed force and (2) smashing his institutions. But it could also mean his physical annihilation, as on the field of battle. European socialists routinely talked of “class war,” but they meant by it a struggle waged mainly with non-violent means, such as industrial strikes and the ballot box, which might, at a certain point, culminate in barricades. Lenin and he alone understood “class war” in the literal sense to mean civil war—warfare with every available weapon for the purpose of strategic destruction and, if need be, extermination of rivals that left the victor with unchallenged mastery of the political battlefield. Revolution in this view was war waged by other means, the difference being that the combatants were not states and nations but social classes: its battle lines ran vertically rather than horizontally. In this militarization of politics lay a critical source of Lenin’s success, for those whom he designated as enemies could not conceive of anyone seriously treating politics as combat in which quarter was neither given nor expected.