The Russian Revolution полностью

But this lay in the future. The immediate problems involved revolutionary tactics, and here Lenin found himself at odds with his associates.

In spite of the willingness of the socialists in the Soviet to forgive and forget the July putsch and despite their defense of the Bolsheviks against the government’s harassment, Lenin decided that the time for masking his bid for power under Soviet slogans had passed: henceforth, the Bolsheviks would have to strive for power directly, openly, by means of armed insurrection. In “The Political Situation,” written on July 10, one day after reaching his rural hideaway, he argued:

All hopes for the peaceful evolution of the Russian Revolution have disappeared without trace. The objective situation: either the ultimate triumph of the military dictatorship or the triumph of the decisive struggle of the workers…

The slogan of the passage of all power to the soviets was the slogan of the peaceful evolution of the Revolution, which was possible in April, May, June, until July 5–9—that is, until the passage of actual power into the hands of the military dictatorship. Now this slogan is no longer correct, because it does not take into account the completed passage [of power] and the complete betrayal, in deed, of the Revolution by the SRs and Mensheviks.¹⁰²

In the original version of the manuscript Lenin had written “armed uprising,” which he later changed to “decisive struggle of the workers.”¹⁰³ The novelty of these remarks was not that power had to be taken by force—the Bolshevikled armed workers, soldiers, and sailors who had taken over the streets of Petrograd in April and July hardly staged a festival of song and dance—but that the Bolsheviks now had to strike for themselves, without pretending to act on behalf of the soviets.

The Sixth Bolshevik Congress held at the end of July approved this program. Its resolution stated that Russia was now ruled by a “dictatorship of the counterrevolutionary imperialist bourgeoisie” under which the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” had lost its validity. The new slogan called for the “liquidation” of Kerensky’s “dictatorship.” This was the task of the Bolshevik Party, which would rally behind itself all anti-counterrevolutionary groups, headed by the proletariat and supported by the poor peasantry.¹⁰⁴ Dispassionately analyzed, the premises of this resolution were absurd and its conclusions deceptive, but its practical meaning was unmistakable: henceforth the Bolsheviks would wage war against the Soviet as well as against the Provisional Government.

Many Bolsheviks were unhappy over the new tactic and the abandonment of pro-Soviet slogans. On another occasion that month, Stalin tried to put their minds at ease by assuring them that “the party is indubitably in favor of those soviets where we have a majority.”¹⁰⁵

But it was not long before the Bolsheviks, noting a general cooling of interest in the soviets, changed their minds once again: for this growing apathy gave them an opportunity to penetrate and manipulate the soviets for their own ends. Izvestiia, the official soviet organ, wrote at the beginning of September that

in recent times one can observe indifference toward work in soviets.… Indeed, of the more than 1,000 delegates [of the Petrograd Soviet] only 400 to 500 attend its meetings, and those who fail to turn up are precisely representatives of parties which until now had formed a soviet majority¹⁰⁶

—that is, Mensheviks and SRs. The same complaint could be read in Izvestiia one month later in an editorial called “Crisis of the Soviet Organization.” Its author recalled that when the soviets had been at the peak of popularity the “interurban” (inogorodnyi) department of the Ispolkom listed up to 800 soviets in the country. By October, many of these soviets no longer existed or existed only on paper. Reports from the provinces indicated that the soviets were losing prestige and influence. The editorial complained of the inability of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies to get together with peasant organizations, which resulted in the peasantry remaining “entirely outside” the soviet structure. But even in localities where the soviets continued to function, as in Petrograd and Moscow, they no longer represented all “democracy” because many intellectuals and workers stayed away:

The soviets were a marvelous organization to fight the old regime, but they are entirely incapable of taking upon themselves the creation of a new one.… When autocracy fell, and the bureaucratic order along with it, we erected the soviets of deputies as temporary barracks to shelter all democracy.

Now, Izvestiia concluded, the soviets were being abandoned for permanent “stone structures,” such as the Municipal Councils, chosen on a more representative franchise.¹⁰⁷