In adapting his goals to fit the prevailing situation and to make them palatable to the majority of his party, Lenin hewed a thin line; while scaling down his immediate objectives and accepting concessions to the moderates, he nonetheless retained the core of his radical program and his tactical flexibility. In regard to the possibility of forming a unified social democratic party, Lenin was intransigent; alliance with the Mensheviks, he argued, would associate the Bolshevik Party with the Russian defense effort and thus destroy its capacity to lead the world revolutionary struggle. To all who would listen, Lenin declared categorically that he would strike out on his own if his followers insisted on reunification and if they declined actively to oppose the government's war effort. Almost exclusively because of Lenin's interference, discussions regarding unification between the Menshe- viks and Bolsheviks quickly broke down;14 still, a strong attraction for political cooperation with other socialist groups lingered among the Bolsheviks throughout 1917.
Lenin also refused to alter his theoretical analysis of the revolution. In a summation of his views published in the party's main newspaper, Pravda, on April 7—the celebrated "April Theses"—he defined the situation in Russia as the transition between the first, "bourgeois democratic," stage of the revolution and the second, "socialist," stage. He still insisted that the Provisional Government should not be supported in any way and that the party's goal was the transfer of power to the soviets. Yet Lenin's message no longer included an immediate call to arms. As long as the masses retained faith in the bourgeoisie, Lenin explained, the party's primary task was to expose the fraudulence of the Provisional Government and the errors of the Soviet leadership. The party would patiently have to convince the masses that the Provisional Government could not bring peace and that the soviets were the only truly revolutionary form of government.15
In part because of these modifications and in part because of an energetic lobbying campaign, Lenin was able quickly to win a significant portion of the Bolshevik leadership to his side. This initial success is mirrored in the proceedings of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee during April as well as in the results of the First Bolshevik Petrograd City Conference, where Lenin won his initial victories over the right. Meeting from April 14 to 22, the conference adopted by a decisive vote of thirty-seven to three a resolution written by Lenin condemning the Provisional Government and calling for the eventual transfer of power to the soviets.16
At the All-Russian Bolshevik Party Conference, which opened in Petrograd on April 24, Lenin won further victories. The conference resolution on the war reflected Lenin's uncompromising repudiation of the conflict and the Russian defense effort. In its resolution on the government question, the conference condemned the Provisional Government as an instrument of the bourgeoisie and an ally of counterrevolution, and suggested that, for self-protection, the proletariat would have to organize and arm.17
Still, at the April Conference the Kamenev faction argued loud and long for its position, not without significant results. The influence of the moderates is reflected in the fact that five of their number were elected to the nine-man Central Committee,18 insuring the moderation of that body from late April through July. The moderate point of view was also evident in the major conference resolutions.19
Moreover, in part due to the influence of the moderates, full discussion of some of the fundamental theoretical assumptions underlying Lenin's program, most importantly his concept of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, was postponed.20
Taken together, the April Conference resolutions pointed the party vaguely toward the socialist revolution while leaving unanswered the crucial questions "How?" and "When?" While the ultimate goal of transferring power to the soviets was implicit in several of the resolutions, for the time being the party was to concentrate on "the prolonged task of building up the class consciousness of the proletariat," "mobilizing it into opposition to the wavering policies of the petty bourgeoisie," and "increasing and consolidating Bolshevik strength in the soviets."
The dominant view among Bolshevik leaders from all over Russia drawn together for the April Conference was that these tasks would not be accomplished overnight. Yet in the weeks that followed, among workers, soldiers, and sailors in the capital, support for the repudiation of the Provisional Government and the transfer of state power to the soviets grew with astonishing speed. This was partly because of widespread disenchantment with the results of the February revolution. Deteriorating economic conditions had helped trigger the upheaval in the first place. To Petrograd, in particular, the war brought critical shortages of housing, food, clothing, fuel, and raw materials. Some of the shortages stemmed from a halt in the flow of foreign commodities, such as coal from England and cheap cotton from the United States; most, however, were the result of domestic shipping and distribution problems. Russia's internal water transport and railway systems were simply inadequate to meet both civil and military needs. In the case of grain, peasants, finding it impossible to procure manufactured goods, refused to part with their produce for rapidly depreciating paper money. As the scarcity of goods increased, the gap between wages and the rising cost of living widened. Petrograd's roughly 390,000 factory workers, of whom approximately a third were women, were hardest hit by the resulting inflation. Despite a significant increase in nominal wages between the outbreak of the war and the beginning of 1917 (by as much as 260 percent), real wages declined to about a third of prewar levels, largely as a result of drastic increases in the price of consumer necessities.21
The February revolution did not alleviate these difficulties; on the contrary, administrative confusion increased in March and April, and this, in addition to the continued deterioration of transportation, led to a significant worsening of the supply situation. The increased shortages of raw materials and fuel that now developed forced factory owners to curtail production further and led to extensive additional layoffs. Simultaneously, delivery of foodstuffs also continued to decline; attempts by the government to introduce an effective food pricing and rationing system failed to ease the strains caused by these shortages. In the spring of 1917 workers in a number of industries had received substantial wage increases. However, skyrocketing prices quickly offset these gains, so that by early summer Petrograd factory workers, generally speaking, were economically little better off than they had been in February.22
To the 215,000 to 300,000 soldiers of the war-inflated Petrograd garrison, and also to the sailors and soldiers from the nearby Kronstadt naval base, who numbered around 30,000, the fruits of the February revolution were similarly disappointing. In normal times the guards regiments, which formed the backbone of the garrison, had been specially trained units recruited almost exclusively from the peasantry; this traditional core had been squandered in the campaigns of 1914-1916 on the battlefields of East Prussia and Galicia. Consequently, by 1917 most of the troops stationed in and around Petrograd, including those in regiments of the guard, were poorly trained wartime recruits, still predominately of peasant background. Military discipline was foreign to these soldiers; a high percentage had had their fill of duty at the front. The decisive moment of the February revolution had occurred when garrison units, one after another, joined rebelling townspeople.