The picture in the rest of the country was equally chaotic. In Moscow the Bolsheviks discussed launching an insurrection but after a few street rallies called it off. In cities where local Soviets were already under the control of the Bolsheviks, such as Ivanovo-Voznesensk, they teetered on the brink of decisive action but once news came of the collapse in Petrograd they retreated. In Riga and Ekaterinburg local Soviets adopted resolutions calling for a purely Sovietled government but refrained from further action until sure it had succeeded in Petrograd. These quiverings of possible insurrection subsided once the surge in Petrograd fell back. With the immediate threat passed, the Provisional Government, now with the open support of Soviet leaders Tseretelli and Dan, moved to arrest leading Bolsheviks whom they believed had planned to overthrow the government and the Soviet Executive. On 6th July armed troops loyal to the Provisional Government surrounded the Khesinskaya Mansion and moved in, arresting many Bolshevik leaders and clearing the building. Lenin and Zinoviev had already fled to Finland.
The moderate socialists in the Soviet Executive had now made clear that they had no desire to “take power”. As they saw it they already had power through their working alliance with the Menshevik and SR Ministers in Kerensky’s government. The leading dissenter from this line within the Menshevik Party was Martov. Faced with the Soviet Executive supporting the continuation of an imperialist war and throwing Bolsheviks in the Peter and Paul Fortress, he put aside his reluctance for socialists to assume governmental power.
It was now clear that the Russian bourgeoisie had no wish to carry out a radical revolution. Martov therefore called for a new, exclusively socialist government based on the Soviets. At a Menshevik congress he demanded such a government begin immediate peace negotiations while renouncing annexations and democratising the army; prepare for a Constituent Assembly to begin agrarian reform “on the basis of the confiscation and handing over to the people of all land belonging to Crown, monasteries, and landowners”; introduce financial reforms and progressive taxation on property; and implement a “planned redistribution of productive forces” by way of nationalisation of the pillars of the economy.
This was a clear departure from the policy of socialist abstention from power in the “bourgeois revolution”. For the first time it offered a programme that could be agreed by Menshevik-Internationalists, the SRs and most Bolsheviks. Tseretelli responded to it head on, replying, “Should we, the Soviet majority, take power into our hands, would not then all of you, from Martov to Lenin, demand of us actions which, in our opinion, would lead to a separate war, and would you not want to foist upon us your slogan ‘no offensive but an armistice’? But such policies are unacceptable to us”.11 Martov, disgusted, refused to support the arrest warrant issued for Lenin. He grew increasingly alienated from Tseretelli and Dan, and in August sent fraternal greetings to the Bolshevik Party’s 6th Congress. Once again, as in August 1914 and at Zimmerwald, Lenin and Martov inched closer to an alliance. But it was not to be.
Instead, the alliance cemented during the summer months was between Lenin and Trotsky. In the months leading up to October 1917, the two men discovered they shared a common vision. Almost unnoticed in the RSDLP’s fratricidal strife of 1905-14, Trotsky and the Marxist theorist Alexander Parvus had produced an ingenious theory that would perfectly compliment Lenin’s April Theses, a theory that was a radical departure from the entire theoretical paradigm of Russian Social Democracy. What came to be known as the theory of Permanent Revolution arose from Trotsky’s experience in the 1905 Revolution, after which he concluded that the relatively small Russian working class must take the leading role in whatever revolutionary process grew out of the collapse of the autocracy. From this he and Parvus created a justification for socialist revolution in economically and socially backward countries that turned Marxism on its head.
The core of Marx’s and Engels’ conception of socialist revolution was that it would be carried out by a “mature” proletariat. Because of its position within the capitalist system–exploited yet indispensable–the working class would inevitably shake off the fetters of that system and take command of it for the common good. This flattered socialists in Germany, France and America, but it offered little to Marxists in Russia who were compelled to accept a secondary role in the forthcoming world revolution. Yet Russia, not America, had experienced revolution in 1905. In Results and Prospects (1907), Trotsky fleshed out a new theory of how anti-capitalist revolution might arise. Impatient with the caution of official Social Democracy, he wrote:
In spite of the fact that the productive forces of the United States are ten times as great as those of Russia, nevertheless the political role of the Russian Proletariat, its influence on the politics of its own country and the possibility of its influencing the politics of the world in the future, are incomparably greater than those of the proletariat of the United States.12
Subsequent events proved him right.
When first published, the theory of Permanent Revolution was derided by the great seers of European Social Democracy, including Lenin. Yet in 1917, without overt acknowledgement, he would in all essentials adopt it. For what was the April Theses if not a programmatic version of Permanent Revolution? Certainly Trotsky saw it as such and upon his return to Russia he struggled to find reasons not to join the Bolsheviks, finally doing so in July 1917 after the July Days demonstrated to him that only Lenin saw the need to expand beyond the Provisional Government to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In return Lenin, as he had in 1905, “again detached himself from the clear and simple notion of the two revolutions, bourgeois and socialist, profoundly distinct from one another, with only the former a matter for the present moment”.13
With Trotsky joining the Bolsheviks, Lenin secured as one of his principal lieutenants a Marxist agitator of incomparable intellectual and organisational gifts, a tornado of revolutionary energy who eclipsed veteran Bolsheviks like Zinoviev and Kamenev. Both of these would gladly have formed alliances with Left Mensheviks like Martov in the broad-based socialist government the latter was now calling for. Trotsky, until recently a Menshevik Internationalist and close collaborator of Martov, would never have done this. As he later put it in his history of 1917, “The relation of class forces is not a mathematical quantity permitting a priori computations. When the old regime is thrown out of equilibrium, a new correlation of forces can be established only as a result of a trial by battle. That is revolution”.14
For Lenin the trial by battle had arrived. But what was it for? Whilst in hiding in Finland during August and September he wrote what remained his only attempt to describe the kind of socialist society he envisaged after the revolution. The result, The State and Revolution, is his most utopian and problematic work. In the words of a conservative yet astute biographer, “no work could be more un-representative of its author’s political philosophy and general frame of mind than this one by Lenin”.15 This has not prevented Leninist theorists devoting much effort to analysing The State and Revolution to discover what it implies for Lenin’s conception of socialism before October 1917, even though the state socialism the Bolsheviks constructed after October 1917 was its polar opposite. In reality, The State and Revolution has as much relation to Leninist practice as Ayn Rand’s heroic vision of individualistic free enterprise has to the corporate state capitalism of Reagan and Bush.