We publish this text of the
Internationalist Communist Tendency because we are totally in agreement with
its contents and with the presentation that does the Fraction of the
International Communist Left even if we have no organizational link with ITC
and FICL.
DEFENCE OF THE PROLETARIAN CHARACTER OF
OCTOBER 1917
1917, The Proletariat Takes Power
(Internationalist Communist Tendency)
We reproduce here an article of the
ICT about the seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia in October 1917.
Actually, this article is a chapter of a pamphlet of the Communist Workers
Organization that the comrades have decided to re-publish parts on their web
site (www.leftcom.org). This chapter deals
only with the October days, the very ones of the workers insurrection and of
the seizure of power by the "Soviets" or "workers councils"
- organs of the proletarian insurrection and of the exercise of power, it means
the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Trotsky defined them.
We
want to underline the merit of this text for its capacity to present,
concretely, how the soviets as forms of organization of the whole Russian
proletariat, were able to realize their historical task under the leadership of
the Communist Party (the Bolshevik Party), genuine political vanguard of the
proletariat. And how this one could pull itself up at the level of its task
only thanks to the revolutionary mobilization of workers and soldiers masses
and at the cost of internal political struggles within the very Party. In
short, one of the qualities of the text is to highlight and to emphasize the
"dialectical relationship" which concretely established at that
moment between the Party and the whole revolutionary class and which guaranteed
the success of the workers insurrection.
Thus, this text ruins the thesis
ceaseless repeated according to which October 1917 was a simple "coup
d'Etat" organized by a minority of professional revolutionaries led by
Lenin's iron hand. One of the arguments of this thesis is that the
insurrection, more particularly the storming of the Winter Palace, Kerenski's
government building, occurred in a city where calm was prevailing and that it
has been a success because the weakness of the armed defenders of the bourgeois
government. The ICT text responds, it could not be clearer, to this problem. It
shows that it is precisely the strength and the massive mobilization of the
proletariat, politically regrouped around the Bolshevik Party, and even
sometimes being ahead of this one or of important fractions of this one, which
enabled that the State bourgeois power felt down then as a
ripe fruit, with few confrontations and victims. This "easiness" of
the insurrection is, all the contrary, the expression of the strength and the
high consciousness of the great masses of the proletariat at that very moment
and of their direct and massive participation to the seizure of power ; it is
the antithesis of the "coup d'Etat" imposed by a minority.
As well, the text rejects the
mystification of an homogeneous and decided Bolshevik Party or being under one
single man's iron rule, it means under Lenin's. All the contrary, it highlights
how the vanguard Party itself was living through the same kinds of hesitations
and contradictions as the whole class and how the political fight to win the
Party to the insurrection has been difficult and even could have been lost. And
how it is precisely the strength and revolutionary mobilization of the
proletarian masses, on which Lenin and some fractions of the Party leaned on,
which enabled to lead the struggle against those who opposed to the
insurrection within the very organs of the Bolshevik leadership.
Finally,
and lesson as much important, the ICT comrades' article enlivens how Lenin and
the Party were guided by two essential class principles which enable them to be
at the level of the situation : the first one can be defined as the need of the
destruction of the bourgeois State and the setting up of the Dictatorship of
the proletariat ; this principle directs and defines all the communist politics
in the revolutionary periods as well as in the periods when the classes
struggle is less acute and more "daily", included when the
proletariat is not massively mobilized(Note 1) ; the second one, as well
permanent and fundamental, is proletarian internationalism. Just a word on this
: it is precisely the Bolsheviks' internationalist vision, which can't be
reduced to the only denunciation of the imperialist war but which includes the
call for civil war, for the destruction of the bourgeois State and to the
setting up of the Dictatorship of the proletariat - here is the genuine and
consequent class internationalism - which enables them to understand the
absolute necessity to set up the power of the soviets as first pressure point
for the whole international proletariat while the imperialist war, the 1st
World War, was carrying on (Note
2) ; and as concrete, material, factor with above all the international
dimension of the struggle against the imperialist war and for the international
revolution.
We
can see it, the article of the ICT comrades is not an "historical"
text about a past experience whose lessons could eventually been drawn and then
"passing to other thing". At the very moment capitalism is falling
into deep crisis which obliges the bourgeoisie to attack fiercely the
proletariat in all countries and, at the same time, to prepare the only outcome
it can present in front of its economical bankruptcy, it means the generalized
war, the lessons of October 1917 become again essential for the very
development of the class fight of today ; and for presenting the proletarian
and communist alternative to capitalist barbary. The ICT text comes to recall
us the actuality of
the Russian Revolution,
of its principles and its lessons, and the flagship
it is for the historical struggle of the international
proletariat.
March
2012, la FICL
Note
I :We can't develop here on this question. Let's just mention that the
experience of the Bolshevik Party and above all Lenin's - we could also to some
extent quote Trotsky - since the beginnings of the Russian
Social-Democracy is marked by their ability to judge every situation and to
determine the communist intervention in relation to this principle, in relation
to the relationship to the bourgeois State, it means the necessary and
inescapable political class confrontation with this one and at all moment,
at all steps, of the classes struggle.
Note
2 : The concrete and real dimension of the internationalism of the
Bolshevik Party is particularly to be underlined here since it is challenged by
the new "innovators" who call it into question as we underline it in
the presentation we make of Onorato Damen's text, The Russia we love and defend, written in 1943
and that we reproduce in this issue of our bulletin.
1917, The Proletariat Takes Power
"On the evening of October 24th
the Provisional Government had at its disposal little more than 25,000 men. On
the evening of October 25th, when preparations were underway for the storming
of the Winter Palace, the Bolsheviks assembled about 20,000 Red Guards, sailors
and soldiers before that last refuge of the Provisional Government. But within
the palace there were not more than 3000 defenders, and many of those left
their posts during the night. Thanks to the Bolsheviks’ overwhelming
superiority there were no serious battles in the capital from October 24th to
October 26th, and the total number of those killed on both sides was no more
than 15, with no more than 60 wounded.
During these critical hours, as all the
main strategic points in the city passed under Bolshevik control (telephone and telegraph exchanges,
bridges, railroad stations, the Winter Palace etc.), Petrograd continued on the
whole to go about its normal business. Most of the soldiers remained in the
barracks, the plants and the factories continued to operate, and in the schools
none of the classes were interrupted. There were no strikes or mass
demonstrations such had accompanied the February Revolution. The movie theatres
(called cinematographias in those days) were filled, there were regular
performances in all the theatres, and people strolled as usual on the Nevsky
prospect. The ordinary non-political person would not even have noticed the
historic events taking place; even on the streetcar lines, the main form
of public transportation in 1917, service remained normal. It was in one of
those streetcars that Lenin, in disguise, and his bodyguard Eino Rahya
travelled to Smolny late on the evening of the 24th."
Thus the Soviet “dissident” historian,
Roy Medvedev describes the October Revolution. This picture of Lenin going to
the revolution on a tram also conforms with Trotsky’s view of those days.
"Demonstrations, street fights,
barricades — everything comprised in the usual idea of insurrection — were
almost entirely absent. The revolution had no need of solving a problem already
solved. The seizure of the governmental machine could be carried through
according to plan with the help of comparatively small armed detachments guided
from a single centre ... the very fact that the resistance of the government
came down to a defence of the Winter Palace, clearly defines the place occupied
by October 25th in the whole course of the struggle. The Winter Palace was the
last redoubt of a regime politically shattered during its eight months
existence and conclusively disarmed during the
preceding two weeks." (The Russian
Revolution, p.1138).
The Russian privileged classes had
expected an orgy of looting and murder, political chaos and the collapse of
human morality. Instead they were faced with an ordered transition which must
have been even more terrifying for them. The proletarian masses had shown they
had no need of rulers but could found their own forms of government. Of course,
this was later turned into a criticism of the October Revolution by the
historians of our class enemy who portrayed the proletarian revolution only in
terms of its final act. They could thus spread the legend that this was simply
a putsch, a coup d’etat by a small, fanatical, group whilst the masses passively
sat on the sidelines. It is surprising that such a myth has not collapsed under
the weight of its own absurdity. Apart from the fact that the Bolshevik Party
had 300,000 members or the fact that it had the active support of nearly every
soldier in Petersburg
(about 300,000 men), how was it
possible for them to have debated publicly the seizure of power in the press for
all to read for a fortnight before the final arrest of the Provisional
Government? Establishing the proletarian nature of the October Revolution is
not our aim here since we take this as a given fact. What we need to look at
are the circumstances under which that revolution took place, to examine not
only how the proletariat made the Bolshevik Party its instrument but also how
the tactics of the Bolsheviks were tested in the complex situation of September
and October 1917.
Can the Bolsheviks Win
State Power?
The fate of the bourgeois order in
Russia was sealed from the moment that the armies of the Kaiser occupied Riga
in August 1917. Instead of the promised victories the Germans were now poised
to go all the way to Petersburg. Lenin, however, had been arguing for
insurrection from the moment he realised that the other so-called socialist
parties (the Mensheviks and the S.R.s), true to their theory of supporting a
bourgeois system, did not intend to support soviet power. But the Bolshevik
Central Committee seemed to be ignoring his letters. What was worse for him was
that, as he sat in hiding, the Bolshevik Central Committee seemed to be falling
for Kerensky’s attempts to bolster his tottering rule. In the aftermath of the
defeat of Kornilov the Provisional Government called a “Democratic
Conference” to try to rally the parties represented in the soviet
around bourgeois rule. To Lenin’s horror the Bolshevik Central Committee fell
for this ruse and participated in this charade (Lenin singled out Trotsky for
special praise for arguing for a boycott of this assembly). Furthermore, they
also agreed to participate in the so-called “Preparliament” which Kerensky
hoped to use to legitimise the position of his unelected government.
Lenin responded in a text called From
a Publicist’s Diary in which he denounced the Central Committee:
There is not the slightest doubt that
at the top of our Party there are noticeable vacillations that may become
ruinous ... Not all is well with the “parliamentary” leaders of our Party;
greater attention must be paid to them, there must be greater workers’
supervision over them ... Our Party’s mistake is obvious. The fighting party of
the advanced class need not fear mistakes. What it should fear is persistence
in a mistake …"(Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 340-1).
Not only did the Bolshevik leaders
around Kamenev persist in mistakes, but they made them worse by suppressing all
Lenin’s criticisms of their approach to the Democratic Conference and the
future insurrection.
Although Lenin wrote thousands of words
to stimulate them into action they ensured that the key passages were edited
out. In frustration Lenin finally submitted his resignation from the Central
Committee but “reserving for myself freedom to campaign amongst the rank and
file”.
Although the Central Committee did not
even discuss this resignation letter, it freed Lenin to take up private
correspondence with individuals who were in other Party organisations. This
once again revealed that Lenin was not an isolated figure battling against a
mediocre party as all histories of the Russian Revolution make out. His
struggle was against a party leadership which had become concerned more about
the survival of the Party than the victory of the workers. Once the rest of the
Party were aware of the issues they followed Lenin. The best example of this
was the Petersburg Committee. When it learnt of the censorship of the
discussion they were outraged against the Central Committee In fact the really
interesting discussion about the need for insurrection took place in the
Petersburg Committee. Here there was no element like Kamenev who wanted a deal
with the Mensheviks, and who did not really accept the internationalist
orientation of the Bolsheviks. This had developed out of the Zimmerwald and
Kienthal conferences at the beginning of the First World War, and had been
given new programmatic shape in Lenin’s Imperialism - the Highest Stage of
Capitalism. The international question was now obvious in the
concerns of the Bolsheviks in Petersburg. In the debate over the need for
insurrection the most coherent opponent of Lenin’s was Volodarsky. He pointed
to the backwardness of Russia and insisted that the Bolsheviks should mark time
because the Russian Revolution could only succeed as part of a world
revolution. Lenin’s s supporters agreed that the fate of the Russian Revolution
was dependent on the fate of the world revolution. But they argued that the
proletariat in backward Russia had been given a chance not yet offered to the
working class anywhere else. The Russian workers must seize power and hold on
whilst the European revolution developed.
This argument for not delaying any
longer won the day. Lenin enshrined the internationalist position in his text
The Crisis has Matured. This text like many others written in this period
deserves to be read in full but we will content ourselves with just a few lines
which indicate the internationalist essence of Bolshevism — the one factor that
made it uniquely working class in the First World War.
"The end of September
undoubtedly marked a great turning point in the history of the Russian
revolution and, to all appearances, of the world revolution as well ... This
stage may be called the eve of revolution. Mass arrests of party leaders in
free Italy, and particularly the beginning of mutinies in the German army are
indisputable symptoms that a great turning point is at hand, that we are on the
eve of world-wide revolution ... And since of all the proletarian
internationalists in all countries only we Russian Bolsheviks enjoy a measure
of freedom - we have a legal party and a score or so of papers, we have the
Soviets ... of both capitals on our side and we have the support of a majority
of the people in a time of revolution - to us the saying “To whom much has been
given, of him much will be required”, in all justice can and must be
applied." (Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 342-3).
It was an argument which won over the
party, and on October 10th, the Central Committee voted to accept in principle
the idea of organizing the insurrection. It was not simply a victory for one
man, or even one party, but for the international working class. The problem
now was how the insurrection would come about.
The Soldiers Become
Bolsheviks
As we showed in the previous chapter,
the Bolsheviks won enormous support for their policies well before the Second
All-Russia Congress of Soviets was called. In fact 80% of the worker delegates
to that body were Bolshevik supporters. However, this does not mean that the
proletariat was imbued with a communist consciousness since this would have
been an impossibility under the prevailing conditions. What they did have were
concrete demands which accumulated as 1917 wore on. They wanted an end to the
war and its associated miseries of food shortages and inflation.
They had seen that coalition with the
bourgeois Provisional Government only continued the war. Furthermore, the
Germans continued to advance closer to Petersburg and it was widely believed
that Kerensky aimed to allow it to fall into enemy hands so that the revolution
there could be crushed. All this meant that the Bolsheviks were bound to increase
their support since they were the only party which opposed the war in
unambiguous terms and which had all along called for “All Power to the
Soviets”. In October 1917 these issues became tied together as
barracks after barracks voted not to obey orders to go to the front, and to
listen only to the Soviets. Typical of these resolutions was that of the
Egersky Guards Regiment on October 12th:
"The pulling out of the
revolutionary garrison from Petrograd is needed only by the privileged
bourgeoisie as a means of stifling the revolution ... We declare to all who
listen that, while refusing to leave Petrograd, we will nonetheless heed the
voice of the genuine leaders of the workers and poorer peasantry, that is the
Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. We will believe in and follow it
because everything else is pure treachery and open mockery of the world
revolution." (As quoted in Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to
Power, p. 227).
This resolution was passed as part of
the final critical struggle for control of the forces in Petersburg. On October
9th Trotsky had been able to get a resolution passed in the Petersburg Soviet
which called for peace, the removal of the Kerensky government and, most
significantly, proposed that the defence of Petersburg be undertaken by the
Soviet itself. As a result of its acceptance this proposal created the famous
Military Revolutionary Committee which was to coordinate the practical seizure
of power on October 25th. Contrary to later Stalinist myths, the committee was
not set up as a premeditated coordinator of the takeover. It only became so
because the Mensheviks refused to take part in it. The committee was thus
composed solely of Bolsheviks and Left S.Rs who were united on the need to
transfer power to the soviets. Furthermore, the resolution to set up the
Military Revolutionary Committee came before the Bolshevik Central Committee
finally accepted Lenin’s arguments about an immediate seizure of power. The
final proof that the Military Revolutionary Committee was not foreseen as the
organiser of the October Revolution was that Lenin, and most Bolsheviks (with
the exceptions of Trotsky and Volodarsky) looked to the Bolsheviks’ own
Military Organisation to carry out the practical preparations. However, the
latter, which had gone in for adventurism in July, had been so severly
criticised within the Party that it now did not want to get its fingers burnt
again.
Their preparations were so deliberate
and cautious that in the end they played a subsidiary, rather than a leading role.
The chief reason for this was, as with
so many issues in 1917, the bourgeoisie’s imperialist desires to continue the
war. The war had brought the fall of Tsardom, it would now finally bring the
end of the Russian bourgeoisie and their social democratic lapdogs in the
S.R.and Menshevik Parties. In view of the fact that Kerensky needed the
Petersburg garrison at the front and in view of the fact that the troops would
not go, Kerensky was in fact faced with a mutiny from the moment the troops put
themselves under the leadership of the Soviet’s Military Revolutionary
Committee. Once Kerensky and his Petersburg commander General Polkovnikov
realised this, it was already too late. The Military Revolutionary Committee
had managed to get commissars loyal to the Soviet elected in most of the
regiments. When Kerensky realised he had few reliable troops in the capital he
telegraphed for troops from the front but was told that the troops there were
so “infested with Bolshevism” that they would refuse to move unless
told the purpose of their transfer. In short the Provisional Government was
already virtually paralysed. When Kerensky finally did act on October 23rd it
was to call for the arrest of all the Bolsheviks who were out on bail after the
July Days (this included all the military leaders of the Party), and to close
down the Bolshevik press for sedition. But in order to carry out these measures
he had to rely on cadets from officer training schools, a women’s shock
battalion and a rifle regiment of war wounded. The forcible seizure of the Trud press where
Rabochii Put, a Bolshevik paper addressed to workers, was published,
was the signal for the Military Revolutionary Committee to react. The press was
soon in workers’ hands again and troops loyal to the Military Revolutionary
Committee persuaded those thinking of responding to Kerensky’s appeals to
remain neutral. As with the Kornilov Affair, troops being moved towards the
capital were also persuaded not to assist the counter-revolution.
Militarily there were now no obstacles
to a seizure of power by the working class but there remained the question of
when and how. This debate, which had raged in the Bolshevik Party throughout
September, had still not been finally resolved despite the famous vote of
October 10th. Whilst some members of the Military Revolutionary Committee
wanted the immediate overthrow of Kerensky, other Bolsheviks still saw such an
uprising as either wrong or premature. Trotsky summarised the situation
correctly:
"The government is powerless;
we are not afraid of it because we have sufficient strength ... Some of our
comrades, for example Kamenev and Riazanov, do not agree with our assessment of
the situation. However we are leaning neither to the right or to the left. Our
tactical line has been developed by developing circumstances. We grow stronger
every day. Our task is to defend ourselves and gradually to expand our sphere
of authority so as to build a solid foundation for tomorrow’s Congress of
Soviets." (Quoted in Rabinowitch, p. 253).
This was not how Lenin liked it of
course. After seven weeks of campaigning for an immediate uprising against a
defeated enemy, he could not contain himself. For the second time in a month he
disobeyed the Central Committee’s instructions to remain in hiding and took his
famous tram ride to the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute. He had
already sent an appeal to lower levels of the Party urging them to act before
the Central Committee. It was a summary of all he had argued before:
"History will not forgive
revolutionaries for procrastinating when they could be victorious today (and
they certainly will be victorious today), while they risk losing much tomorrow,
in fact they risk losing everything. If we seize power today, we seize it not
in opposition to the soviets but on their behalf. It would be a disaster, or a
sheer formality, to await the wavering vote of October 25. The people have the
right and are in duty bound to decide such questions, not by a vote, but by
force, in critical moments of the revolution ... The government is tottering.
It must be given the deathblow at all costs. To delay action is fatal."
In fact, both positions contain
important elements of the truth. Trotsky recognised that there was no further
chance for a new Kornilov to appear.
He saw that things were quickly enough
as it was to a final denouement (and Trotsky was amongst the most active in
ensuring the process was speeded up). Trotsky also knew something Lenin didn’t,
namely, that the composition of the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets would
be overwhelmingly for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Lenin feared
that it would still contain enough Mensheviks and S.Rs to postpone any decision
on soviet power until the Constituent Assembly, “which cannot possibly be favourable
to us”, met. He wanted to present the other “socialist parties” with a fait
accompli. If the Mensheviks rejected it then they would expose
themselves as bourgeois in front of the working class. In fact this is almost
how things turned out.
Proletarian October
The October Revolution has been called
the best planned revolution of all time. A militant proletariat, steeled in
battle and with its own political instrument in the Bolshevik Party, took power
in the most orderly of mass actions in history. However this should not obscure
certain facts which are characteristic of the relation of party and class. The
Bolshevik Central Committee never, at any time, decided on the date for
insurrection. It was simply overruled by the march of events and it was the
Bolshevikcontrolled Military revolutionary Committee of the Petersburg Soviet
which directed the final attack. Even here though, the real political
leadership of the Bolshevik Party lay, not in the committee rooms of Smolny,
but on the streets.
When Kerensky sent cadets to close the
bridges over the Neva (thus cutting Petersburg’s centre from the working class
districts on the Vyborg side) just as he had done in July.
"... they were challenged by an
irate crowd of citizens, many of them carrying weapons. Forced to give up their
arms the cadets were escorted humiliatingly back to their academy; as nearly as
can be determined, this action took place without any specific directives from
the Military Revolutionary Committee. Similarly, as soon as the struggle for
the bridges began, Ilyin-Zhenevsky, also acting on his own, saw to it that
garrison soldiers took control of the smaller Grenadersky and Samsonevsky
bridges …" (Rabinowitch p.261).
In short, despite all the planning and
all the debates the revolution was not the work of a minority simply leading a
passive majority. The Bolsheviks as a military directing centre were not as
well-prepared as Stalinist histories have made out. Their real success as a
leadership of the working class was in imbuing the mass movement with clear
goals that it could follow. Thus the Liteiny Bridge was shut by workers acting
on their own consciousness of the importance of the situation, whilst an
individual Bolshevik (Ilyin-Zhenevsky) doesn’t wait for instructions form the “centre”, but can
act on his own initiative in accordance with the demands of the situation. As
we have shown throughout this document, the Bolsheviks’ fitness for the
revolutionary task was not the result of some assumed infallibility is strategy
and tactics but in the fact that it was a party genuinely rooted in the class
conscious vanguard of the working class - and a party capable of learning from
its mistakes. In this sense it was the organiser of the proletariat in the
October Revolution.
Without its general direction of the
class vanguard the October Revolution would have become another heroic failure
to put on a historical list that is already too long.
The final evidence of the Bolsheviks’
leadership of the masses came in the figures of the allegiance of the delegates
to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets which gave the Bolsheviks 300 and
the S.Rs 193 (of which half were Left S.Rs who supported the overthrow of the
Provisional Government), whilst there were 68 Mensheviks and 14 of Martov’s
Menshevik Internationalists. The remainder were mainly non-affiliated but, as
the voting soon showed, largely followed the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks
supported a motion by Martov to establish a coalition government of all the
socialist parties, but this was sabotaged by the Mensheviks and S.Rs, who made
it clear they were walking out of the Congress. They hoped to mobilise the
proletariat against the Bolsheviks but in fact, as the proletariat supported
the Bolsheviks they simply walked, in Trotsky’s words, into “the dustbin of
history”. This one Menshevik-Internationalist, Sukhanov,
realised when he alter wrote:
"By quitting the Congress , we
ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses and of
the revolution."
Despite further attempts by Martov’s
Menshevik Internationalists to try to form a coalition including those parties
which rejected soviet power, the Congress now overwhelmingly endorsed the
insurrection. At about the same time the Winter Palace fell into the hands of
the working class and the members of the Provisional government were arrested –
the only arrests made by the working class. Kerensky had earlier escaped to try
to rally frontline troops. This turned out to be another demonstration of the
overwhelming victory of the Bolsheviks since his efforts almost ended with his
own arrest. Disguised as woman, he fled Russian to write increasingly
mendacious memoirs at Harvard law School over the next half century.
Meanwhile Lenin has emerged from the
shadows of hiding to greet the Congress of Soviets with the simple statement “We
shall now proceed to construct the socialist order”. The real history
of the Russian working class revolution had begun…
A List of the Main
Books Referred to in this Text
J. Carmichael, A Short History of
the Russian Revolution, 1980.
E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution
(Volume One), 1972
M. Ferro, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1985.
N. Harding, Lenin’s Political
Thought, 1983.
M. Leibman, Leninism under Lenin, 1980.
A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come
to Power, 1979.
F. Raskolnikov, Kronstadt and
Petrograd, 1982.
N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution
1917, 1984 (Princeton, NJ).
L. Trotsky, The History of the
Russian Revolution, 1977.
