In 1905 Lenin had modified the classic Marxist blueprint for a two-stage revolution, generally viewed by Russian social democrats as applicable to Russia, when he suggested that following the overthrow of the tsar, a "revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" might pave the way for a socialist revolution without an extended period of liberal government and capitalist industrial development.
After the outbreak of World War I, within all the major Russian socialist groups there had emerged udefensist" factions, which supported the Russian war effort, and "internationalist" factions, which condemned the military struggle in Europe and called for the arrangement of an immediate peace without victors or vanquished. At this time, Lenin had once again set himself squarely apart from most of his fellow socialists by rejecting support for his nation's war effort and proposing instead the fomenting of social revolution in all the warring countries as an immediate social democratic slogan. Subsequently, he had constructed a bold if coolly received theory to show that with the eruption of the war, the capitalist system had reached its highest, "imperalist," stage, a critical situation in international economic affairs that would inevitably precipitate an international socialist revolution.7
By the beginning of 1917, as the result of rapidly worsening economic conditions, staggering military reverses and horrendous personnel losses, and historically unprecedented governmental incompetence and mismanagement, the old regime was bankrupt among virtually all segments of the Russian population. On February 23, International Women's Day, disturbances that broke out among long lines of housewives waiting in the bitter cold to buy bread touched off massive demonstrations calling for the overthrow of the monarchy and an end to the war. A week later Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.
Lenin, who had been in exile abroad for close to a decade, was then in Zurich, Switzerland. Most of what he knew about the revolution in those early weeks he gleaned from conservative European newspapers, an obvious handicap but not one to prevent him from attempting to direct the activities of his followers in Russia. Reading accounts of Russian developments in the London Times, Le Temps, and the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Lenin quickly concluded that while the workers had led the struggle during the February
Soldiers and cossacks celebrating during the February days in Petrograd.
days, the bourgeoisie had taken advantage of the situation to consolidate its own political power in Petrograd. To judge by his writings of March 1917, he seems not to have appreciated the degree to which socialist leaders in Petrograd had cooperated with liberals in the formation of the Provisional Government, or the extent to which the population at large, at least for the moment, acquiesced in this development. Lenin assumed that revolutionary Russian workers, having helped bring down the regime of Nicholas II, would instinctively see that a bourgeois government would do no more than the tsarist regime to fulfill their keenest aspirations. Moreover, following three years of the most terrible warfare in history, the end of which was not yet in sight, Lenin was obsessed by the thought that all of the major European countries were on the threshold of socialist revolution and that a proletarian insurrection in Russia would be the spark that would spur desperate, peace-hungry workers everywhere to rise against their governments. Thus in his initial directives to the party leadership in Petrograd, partially contained in his "Letters from Afar," he insisted on the necessity of arming and organizing the masses for the imminent second stage of the revolution, which would overthrow the "government of capitalists and large landowners."8
Returning to Petrograd on April 3, Lenin declared publicly that the February revolution had not solved the Russian proletariat's fundamental problems, that the working class of Russia could not stop halfway, and that in
alliance with the soldier-masses the Russian proletariat would turn the bourgeois democratic revolution into a proletarian socialist revolution.9
The Petrograd Bolshevik organization in 1917 included many leaders whose views differed significantly from Lenin's; Bolsheviks of varying persuasions had important influence in determining the party's policies, contributing ultimately to its success. There were, among others, "moderate" or "right" Bolsheviks, who consistently rejected almost all of Lenin's fundamental theoretical and strategic assumptions. Their best known and most articulate spokesman was the thirty-four-year-old, Moscow-born Lev Ka- menev, a Bolshevik since 1903. Kamenev did not accept the idea that the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia was complete. Believing that the Russian working class was still relatively weak, rejecting the supposition that all Europe was on the verge of revolt, and convinced that neither the Russian peasantry nor the foreign bourgeoisie would permit the victory of socialism in Russia, the mild-mannered Kamenev, from the time of his return to Petrograd from Siberia in mid-March 1917, advocated vigilant socialist control over the Provisional Government rather than the latter's removal. In succeeding months, as the Russian revolution deepened, Kamenev spoke out for the creation of an exclusively socialist government; this was to be a broad coalition made up of all major socialist groups, which would retain its mandate only until the establishment of a democratic republic by a Constituent Assembly. On the war issue, Kamenev called for support of the Russian war effort pending conclusion of a negotiated peace, a position closer to that of most moderate socialists than to Lenin's.
Among Petrograd Bolsheviks in 1917 there were many other independent-minded leaders who, while sharing Lenin's theoretical assumptions regarding the possibility of a socialist revolution in Russia, often disagreed with him on tactical questions. Foremost of these was the legendary Lev Trotsky, then thirty-eight, who had first gained both international fame and enormous stature among the Petrograd masses as the bold and courageous chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet during the revolution of 1905. A brilliant writer, Trotsky was a tireless and spellbinding public speaker justly considered one of the greatest orators of modern times.10
The general direction of Bolshevik activity in 1917 was set by the Seventh All-Russian Party Conference in April and the Sixth Bolshevik Party Congress of late July and early August; between such national assemblies it was determined primarily by majority vote of a democratically elected party Central Committee. At the same time, amid the chaotic, locally varying, constantly fluctuating conditions prevailing in Russia in 1917, the Central Committee, at the top of the Bolshevik organizational hierarchy, was simply unable to control the behavior of major regional organizations. Except in a broad, general way, it rarely tried. In Petrograd, important auxiliary arms such as the Petersburg Committee,11 which directed party work in the capital, and the Military Organization,12 responsible for the conduct of revolutionary activity among troops, were relatively free to tailor their tactics and appeals to suit local conditions. When necessary, they staunchly protected their prerogatives.