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Lenin and the Bolshevik Seizure of Power, 1900-1917

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Lenin and the Bolshevik Seizure of Power, 1900-1917 1 Lenin and the Bolshevik Seizure of Power, 1900-1917 The years 1900 to 1917 were triumphant for Lenin. He returned from Siberian exile in 1900 at the age of 30, settled briefly in European Rus­ sia, and then left for Western Europe. He came back seventeen years later in April 1917 as a famous revolutionary and the leader of a mili­ tant party. While abroad, he had helped create that party, attracting followers both inside and outside of Russia. Once in Russia again, he planned for the seizure of power of which he had long dreamed. Lenin's writings prior to the October Revolution are notable for his preoccupation with appropriate tactics for making a revolution and for the innovations he made to Marxist theory. Most notably, Lenin believed that peasant Russia was ripe for revolution despite Marx's argument that a developed bourgeois society must precede a proletar­ ian one. Readers of Lenin's ''April Theses" (Document 6) and the other selections in this chapter can identify several constants in his pre­ revolutionary thought, including hostility to bourgeois life and prac­ tices, unwavering interest in acquiring and employing state power for revolutionary ends, and impatience for the revolution to begin. In 1902, in W'hat Is to Be Done? (Document 2), Lenin explained how to make a revolution in a backward society with a "party of a new type," that is, an elite centralized party that could seize power and also rule. The Revolution of 1905 and the effects of World War I (1914-1918) on the great bourgeois nations convinced him that an opportunity for European revolution unforeseen by Marx and Engels had arisen. The documents in this chapter also illuminate Lenin's struggle for power. In almost every one, Lenin the pragmatist wrestles with Lenin the ideologue. Believing that he alone knew how to take power, how­ ever, Lenin was always innovating and modifying the teachings of Marx and Engels. Where then does the balance rest between his flex­ ibility and his commitment to Marxism in his theoretical writings and his tactical directives? 37 J. Brooks et al., Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State © Bedford/St. Martin’s 2007 Lenin as a Theorist of Revolution 1 From The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement December 1900 The following excerpt reveals the logic of Lenin's early belief in the immi­ nence of revolution. Many of his fellow Marxists were drawn to the work­ ers' struggle for improved working conditions and better wages, but Lenin had a more radical vision. In that respect, this essay is pivotal to his thought. Why, if he sought a proletarian revolution, did Lenin refuse to identify himself with the workers' struggle for a better life? Why did he believe that incremental victories that improved workers' lives were no victories at all? Our principal and fundamental task is to facilitate the political develop­ ment and the political organization of the working class. Those who push this task into the background, who refuse to subordinate to it all the special tasks and particular methods of struggle, are following a false path and causing serious harm to the movement. And it is being pushed into the background, firstly, by those who call upon revolution­ aries to employ only the forces of isolated conspiratorial circles cut off from the working-class movement in the struggle against the govern­ ment. It is being pushed into the background, secondly, by those who restrict the content and scope of political propaganda, agitation, and organization; who think it fit and proper to treat the workers to "poli­ tics" only at exceptional moments in their lives, only on festive occa­ sions; who too solicitously substitute demands for partial concessions from the autocracy for the political struggle against the autocracy; and who do not go to sufficient lengths to ensure that these demands for partial concessions are raised to the status of a systematic, implacable struggle of a revolutionary, working-class party against the autocracy. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 4 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 369. 38 2 From What Is to Be Done? 1902 This essay represents Lenin's most important contribution to revolution­ ary practice. In 1900, he and others established the Marxist newspaper Iskra (The Spark), which Lenin cast as the ideological center of a new party. Yet it was an outlet journal for educated activists, and was much too difficult for rank-and-file proletarians to understand. In that respect, Iskra suited Lenin's idea of an elite revolutionary party, which he describes in the following selection. Lenin took his title from the well­ known novel of the same name by mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary Nicholai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), who imagined an ascetic revolu­ tionary hero and an ideal community. The occasion for Lenin's essay was the struggle for leadership that occurred within the Russian Social­ Democratic Workers' Party before the Second Party Congress (1903), at which the split between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks took place. Whereas the Mensheviks tended to support a broad party organi­ zation in which ordinary workers and trade unionists could participate on a part-time basis, Lenin wanted a centralized underground party of professional revolutionaries that could more easily avoid the police. He believed that workers needed such a party because they were unable to develop revolutionary ideology and tactics on their own. Lenin drove home this message by contrasting the aimless and ineffective "spontane­ ity" of the masses with the purposeful "consciousness" of the Social­ Democrats, his revolutionary elite. Thus he distinguishes between a mass party of "a hundred fools" and an elite party that he characterizes as "a dozen wise men." In considering this document, readers should note Lenin's use of the pronoun "we" and his image of a group of militant devotees marching along a single path. We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), 355, 369-70, 374-75, 384, 460, 464. 39 40 LENIN AND THE BOLSHEVIK SEIZURE OF POWER, 1900-1917 their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbor­ ing marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have re­ proached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of con­ ciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What back­ ward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are "free" to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh! ... Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary move­ ment. ... [F]or Russian Social-Democrats the importance of theory is enhanced by three other circumstances, which are often forgotten: first, by the fact that our Party is only in the process of formation, its features are only just becoming defined, and it has as yet far from settled accounts with the other trends of revolutionary thought that threaten to divert the movement from the correct path .... We shall have occasion further on to deal with the political and organizational duties which the task of emancipating the whole people from the yoke of autocracy imposes upon us. At this point, we wish to state only that the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory . ... In the previous chapter we pointed out how universally absorbed the educated youth of Russia was in the theories of Marxism in the middle of the nineties. In the same period the strikes that followed the famous St. Petersburg industrial war of 189W assumed a similar gen­ eral character. Their spread over the whole of Russia clearly showed the depth of the newly awakening popular movement, and if we are to speak of the "spontaneous element" then, of course, it is this strike movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as sponta­ neous. But there is spontaneity and spontaneity. Strikes occurred in 1 Lenin refers to widespread strikes provoked in part by the St. Petersburg factory owners' refusal to pay workers for the three days of celebrations on the occasion of the coronation of the new tsar, Nicholas II. WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 41 Russia in the seventies and sixties (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and they were accompanied by the "sponta­ neous" destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these "revolts," the strikes of the nineties might even be described as "conscious," to such an extent do they mark the progress which the working-class movement made in that period. This shows that the "spontaneous ele­ ment," in essence, represents nothing more nor less than conscious­ ness in an embryonic form.
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