In other words, mass action, even if unsuccessful, was a valuable device to keep crowds at a high level of tension and combat readiness.*
In the three months that followed his return to Russia, Lenin acted with reckless impetuosity to bring down the Provisional Government by mob action. He subjected the government and its socialist supporters to ceaseless verbal assaults as traitors to the Revolution, and concurrently incited the population to civil disobedience—the army to ignore government orders, the workers to take control of their factories, the communal peasants to seize private land, the ethnic minorities to claim their national rights. He had no timetable, but felt confident of imminent success because each skirmish revealed the indecision as well as the impotence of his adversaries. Had he not lost nerve in the decisive moment during the July putsch he might well have taken power then rather than in October.
Paradoxically, although militarized, Lenin’s (and, later, Trotsky’s) tactics did not entail much physical violence. That was to come later, after power had been secured. The purpose of the propaganda campaigns and mass demonstrations, the barrage of words and the street disorders, was to implant in the minds of opponents as well as of the public at large a sense of inevitability: change was coming and nothing could stop it. Like his pupils and emulators Mussolini and Hitler, Lenin won power by first breaking the spirit of those who stood in his way, persuading them that they were doomed. The Bolshevik triumph in October was accomplished nine-tenths psychologically: the forces involved were negligible, a few thousand men at most in a nation of one hundred and fifty million, and victory came almost without a shot being fired. The whole operation served to confirm Napoleon’s dictum that the battle is won or lost in the minds of men before it even begins.
The Bolsheviks made the first bid for power on April 21, taking advantage of a political crisis over Russia’s war aims.
It will be recalled that at the end of March 1917, the Ispolkom compelled the Provisional Government to repudiate Miliukov’s claim to Austrian and Turkish territories. To placate the socialists, the government issued on March 27 a declaration, cleared by the Ispolkom, in which, without in so many words renouncing annexationist ambitions, it declared Russia’s objective to be “lasting peace” based on the “self-determination of nations.”
This concession put the matter to rest, but only temporarily. It became once again a bone of contention in April with the return to Russia of Victor Chernov. The leader of the SR Party had spent the war years in the West, mainly in Switzerland, where he participated in the Zimmerwald and Kiental conferences, and published, allegedly with German funds, revolutionary literature for Russian prisoners of war in Germany and Austria.51 Back in Petrograd, he immediately launched a campaign against Miliukov, calling for his resignation and asking the government to transmit its March 27 declaration to Allied governments as a formal statement of Russia’s war aims. Miliukov objected to this demand on the grounds that the Allies could misinterpret Russia’s formal renunciation of the territories promised to her to mean that she intended to leave the war. But the cabinet overruled him: Kerensky displayed particular zeal in this affair, which promised to undermine Miliukov, his principal rival, and to strengthen his own position in the Soviet.52 Eventually, a compromise was reached. The government agreed to hand the Allies its declaration of March 27 but accompany it with an explanatory note which would remove any doubts about Russia’s intention to stay in the war. In the words of Kerensky, the note drafted by Miliukov and approved by the cabinet “should have satisfied the most violent critic of Miliukov’s ‘imperialism.’ ”53 It reaffirmed Russia’s determination to fight for the alliance’s common “high ideals” and “fully to carry out the obligations” toward it.54 On April 18 (May 1 in the West), the two documents were cabled to Russian embassies abroad for transmittal to Allied governments.
When the government’s note appeared in Russian newspapers on the morning of April 20 it enraged the socialist intelligentsia. Its displeasure was due not to the pledge to fight until victory, which was the stated objective of all the socialist parties save for a fringe minority, but to the ambivalent language about “annexations and contributions.” The Ispolkom voted that day that “revolutionary democracy will not permit the spilling of blood for … aggressive objectives.” Russia had to fight on, but only until the time when all the belligerents were prepared to make peace without annexations.55
