Lenin’s Speech in the Finland Station Square to Workers, Soldiers and Sailors

3 (16) April 1917

Editor’s note:

No complete record survives of Lenin’s speech on his arrival in Russia at the Finland Station. We produce here a report from Pravda of the event, and a part of Lenin’s speech as recorded by Nikolai Sukhanov in his Russian Revolution 1917, Oxford University Press, 1955 p. 273.

* * *

Newspaper Report

Pravda, No. 24

In the street, standing on top of an armoured car, Comrade Lenin greeted the revolutionary Russian proletariat and the revolutionary Russian army, who had succeeded not only in liberating Russia from tsarist despotism, but in starting a social revolution on an international scale, and added that the proletariat of the whole world looked with hope to the Russian proletariat’s bold steps.

The whole crowd walked in a body behind the car to the Kshesinskaya mansion, where the meeting continued.

* * *

Part of Lenin’s Speech

Quoted by Nikolai Sukhanov

Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers! I am happy to greet in your persons the victorious Russian Revolution, and greet you as the vanguard of the worldwide proletarian army… The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe… The hour is not far distant when at the call of our comrade, Karl Liebknecht, the peoples will turn their arms against their own capitalist exploiters… The worldwide Socialist revolution has already dawned… Germany is seething… Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash. The Russian Revolution accomplished by you has prepared the way and opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide Socialist revolution!

The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution
(April Theses)

4 (17) April 1917

Editor’s note:

This article contains Lenin’s famous April Theses read by him at two meetings held at the Tauride Palace on 4 (17) April 1917, at a meeting of Bolsheviks and at a joint meeting of Bolshevik and Menshevik delegates to the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

* * *

I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of 3 (16) April, and therefore at the meeting on 4 (17) April I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation.

The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself – and for honest opponents – was to prepare the theses in writing. I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tsereteli.^[1] I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report.

Theses

1. In our attitude towards the war, which under the new government of Lvov and co. unquestionably remains on Russia’s part a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of that government, not the slightest concession to ‘revolutionary defencism’ is permissible.

   The class-conscious proletariat can give its consent to a revolutionary war, which would really justify revolutionary defencism, only on condition: (a) that the power pass to the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants aligned with the proletariat; (b) that all annexations be renounced in deed and not in word; (c) that a complete break be effected in actual fact with all capitalist interests.

   In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.

   The most widespread campaign for this view must be organised in the army at the front.

   Fraternisation.

2. The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.

   This transition is characterised, on the one hand, by a maximum of legally recognised rights (Russia is now the freest of all the belligerent countries in the world); on the other, by the absence of violence towards the masses, and, finally, by their unreasoning trust in the government of capitalists, those worst enemies of peace and socialism.

   This peculiar situation demands of us an ability to adapt ourselves to the special conditions of Party work among unprecedentedly large masses of proletarians who have just awakened to political life.

3. No support for the Provisional Government; the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding ‘demand’ that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.
4. Recognition of the fact that in most of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies our Party is in a minority, so far a small minority, as against a bloc of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Popular Socialists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat.

   The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

   As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.

5. Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step – but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.

   Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy.^[2]

   The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.

6. The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.

   Confiscation of all landed estates.

   Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatins, according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.

7. The immediate amalgamation of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
8. It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.
9. Party tasks:

1. Immediate convocation of a Party congress;
2. Alteration of the Party Programme, mainly:

1. On the question of imperialism and the imperialist war;
2. On our attitude towards the state and our demand for a ‘commune state’;^[3]
3. Amendment of our out-of-date minimum programme;

3. Change of the Party’s name.^[4]

10. A new International.

    We must take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the ‘Centre’.^[5]

In order that the reader may understand why I had especially to emphasise as a rare exception the ‘case’ of honest opponents, I invite him to compare the above theses with the following objection by Mr. Goldenberg: Lenin, he said, “has planted the banner of civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy” (quoted in No. 5 of Mr. Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo).

Isn’t it a gem?

I write, announce and elaborately explain:

In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism… in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them…

Yet the bourgeois gentlemen who call themselves Social-Democrats, who do not belong either to the broad sections or to the mass believers in defencism, with serene brow present my views thus: “The banner [!] of civil war” (of which there is not a word in the theses and not a word in my speech!) has been planted (!) “in the midst [!!] of revolutionary democracy…”

What does this mean? In what way does this differ from riot-inciting agitation, from Russkaya Volya?

I write, announce and elaborately explain:

The Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and therefore our task is to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

Yet opponents of a certain brand present my views as a call to “civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy”!

I attacked the Provisional Government for not having appointed an early date or any date at all, for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and for confining itself to promises. I argued that without the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies the convocation of the Constituent Assembly is not guaranteed and its success is impossible.

And the view is attributed to me that I am opposed to the speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly!

I would call this ‘raving’, had not decades of political struggle taught me to regard honesty in opponents as a rare exception.

Mr. Plekhanov in his paper called my speech “raving”. Very good, Mr. Plekhanov! But look how awkward, uncouth and slow-witted you are in your polemics. If I delivered a raving speech for two hours, how is it that an audience of hundreds tolerated this “raving”? Further, why does your paper devote a whole column to an account of the “raving”? Inconsistent, highly inconsistent!

It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain, to recall what Marx and Engels said in 1871, 1872 and 1875 about the experience of the Paris Commune and about the kind of state the proletariat needs.^[6]

Ex-Marxist Mr. Plekhanov evidently does not care to recall Marxism.

I quoted the words of Rosa Luxemburg, who on 4 August 1914 called German Social-Democracy a “stinking corpse”. And the Plekhanovs, Goldenbergs and co. feel ‘offended’. On whose behalf? On behalf of the German chauvinists, because they were called chauvinists!

They have got themselves in a mess, these poor Russian social-chauvinists – socialists in word and chauvinists in deed.

Letters on Tactics

Written 8-13 (21-26) April 1917

Foreword

On 4 (17) April 1917, I had occasion to make a report on the subject indicated in the title, first, at a meeting of Bolsheviks in Petrograd. These were delegates to the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, who had to leave for their homes and therefore could not allow me to postpone it. After the meeting, the chairman, Comrade G Zinoviev, asked me on behalf of the whole assembly to repeat my report immediately at a joint meeting of Bolshevik and Menshevik delegates, who wished to discuss the question of unifying the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

Difficult though it was for me immediately to repeat my report, I felt that I had no right to refuse once this was demanded of me by my comrades-in-ideas as well as by the Mensheviks, who, because of their impending departure, really could not grant me a delay.

In making my report, I read the theses which were published in No. 26 of Pravda, on 7 (20) April 1917.^[7]

Both the theses and my report gave rise to differences of opinion among the Bolsheviks themselves and the editors of Pravda. After a number of consultations, we unanimously concluded that it would be advisable openly to discuss our differences, and thus provide material for the All-Russia Conference of our Party (the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, united under the Central Committee) which is to meet in Petrograd on 20 April (3 May) 1917.

Complying with this decision concerning a discussion, I am publishing the following letters in which I do not claim to have made an exhaustive study of the question, but wish merely to outline the principal arguments, which are especially essential for the practical tasks of the working-class movement.

First Letter: Assessment of the Present Situation

Marxism requires of us a strictly exact and objectively verifiable analysis of the relations of classes and of the concrete features peculiar to each historical situation. We Bolsheviks have always tried to meet this requirement, which is absolutely essential for giving a scientific foundation to policy.

“Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action”, Marx and Engels always said, rightly ridiculing the mere memorising and repetition of ‘formulas’, that at best are capable only of marking out general tasks, which are necessarily modifiable by the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.^[8]

What, then, are the clearly established objective facts which the party of the revolutionary proletariat must now be guided by in defining the tasks and forms of its activity?

Both in my first Letter From Afar (‘The First Stage of the First Revolution’) published in Pravda Nos. 14 and 15, 21 and 22 March 1917, and in my theses, I define ‘the specific feature of the present situation in Russia’ as a period of transition from the first stage of the revolution to the second. I therefore considered the basic slogan, the ‘task of the day’ at this moment to be:

Workers, you have performed miracles of proletarian heroism, the heroism of the people, in the civil war against tsarism. You must perform miracles of organisation, organisation of the proletariat and of the whole people, to prepare the way for your victory in the second stage of the revolution.^[9]

What, then, is the first stage?

It is the passing of state power to the bourgeoisie.

Before the February-March Revolution of 1917, state power in Russia was in the hands of one old class, namely, the feudal landed nobility, headed by Nicholas Romanov.

After the revolution, the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie.

The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.

To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.

But at this point we hear a clamour of protest from people who readily call themselves ‘old Bolsheviks’. Didn’t we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed? Is it not a fact, on the contrary, that it has not even started?

My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more variegated than anyone could have expected.

To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after those ‘old Bolsheviks’ who more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality.

‘The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ has already become a reality^[10] in the Russian revolution, for this ‘formula’ envisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation, this cooperation. ‘The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ – there you have the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ already accomplished in reality.

This formula is already antiquated. Events have moved it from the realm of formulas into the realm of reality, clothed it with flesh and bone, concretised it and thereby modified it.

A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, ‘Communist’ elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists, who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of ‘supporting’ the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government).

The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of ‘old Bolsheviks’).

The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already been realised, but in a highly original manner, and with a number of extremely important modifications. I shall deal with them separately in one of my next letters. For the present, it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

“Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.”^[11]

To deal with the question of ‘completion’ of the bourgeois revolution in the old way is to sacrifice living Marxism to the dead letter.

According to the old way of thinking, the rule of the bourgeoisie could and should be followed by the rule of the proletariat and the peasantry, by their dictatorship.

In real life, however, things have already turned out differently; there has been an extremely original, novel and unprecedented interlacing of the one with the other. We have side by side, existing together, simultaneously, both the rule of the bourgeoisie (the government of Lvov and Guchkov) and a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, voluntarily making itself an appendage of the bourgeoisie.

For it must not be forgotten that actually, in Petrograd, the power is in the hands of the workers and soldiers; the new government is not using and cannot use violence against them, because there is no police, no army standing apart from the people, no officialdom standing all-powerful above the people. This is a fact, the kind of fact that is characteristic of a state of the Paris Commune type. This fact does not fit into the old schemes. One must know how to adapt schemes to facts, instead of reiterating the now meaningless words about a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ in general.

To throw more light on this question let us approach it from another angle.

A Marxist must not abandon the ground of careful analysis of class relations. The bourgeoisie is in power. But is not the mass of the peasants also a bourgeoisie, only of a different social stratum, of a different kind, of a different character? Whence does it follow that this stratum cannot come to power, thus ‘completing’ the bourgeois-democratic revolution? Why should this be impossible?

This is how the ‘old Bolsheviks’ often argue.

My reply is that it is quite possible. But, in assessing a given situation, a Marxist must proceed not from what is possible, but from what is real.

And the reality reveals the fact that freely elected soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies are freely joining the second, parallel government, and are freely supplementing, developing and completing it. And, just as freely, they are surrendering power to the bourgeoisie – a fact which does not in the least contravene the theory of Marxism, for we have always known and repeatedly pointed out that the bourgeoisie maintains itself in power not only by force but, also by virtue of the lack of class-consciousness and organisation, the routinism and downtrodden state of the masses.

In view of this present-day reality, it is simply ridiculous to turn one’s back on the fact and talk about ‘possibilities’.

Possibly the peasantry may seize all the land and all the power. Far from forgetting this possibility, far from confining myself to the present, I definitely and clearly formulate the agrarian programme, taking into account the new phenomenon, i.e. the deeper cleavage between the agricultural labourers and the poor peasants on the one hand, and the peasant proprietors on the other.

But there is also another possibility; it is possible that the peasants will take the advice of the petty-bourgeois party of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, which has yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie, has adopted a defencist stand, and which advises waiting for the Constituent Assembly, although not even the date of its convocation has yet been fixed.^[12]

It is possible that the peasants will maintain and prolong their deal with the bourgeoisie, a deal which they have now concluded through the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies not only in form, but in fact.

Many things are possible. It would be a great mistake to forget the agrarian movement and the agrarian programme. But it would be no less a mistake to forget the reality, which reveals the fact that an agreement, or – to use a more exact, less legal, but more class-economic term – class collaboration exists between the bourgeoisie and the peasantry.

When this fact ceases to be a fact, when the peasantry separates from the bourgeoisie, seizes the land and power despite the bourgeoisie, that will be a new stage in the bourgeois-democratic revolution; and that matter will be dealt with separately.

A Marxist who, in view of the possibility of such a future stage, were to forget his duties in the present, when the peasantry is in agreement with the bourgeoisie, would turn petty bourgeois. For he would in practice be preaching to the proletariat confidence in the petty bourgeoisie (‘this petty bourgeoisie, this peasantry, must separate from the bourgeoisie while the bourgeois-democratic revolution is still on’). Because of the ‘possibility’ of so pleasing and sweet a future, in which the peasantry would not be the tail of the bourgeoisie, in which the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Chkheidzes, Tseretelis and Steklovs would not be an appendage of the bourgeois government – because of the ‘possibility’ of so pleasing a future, he would be forgetting the unpleasant present, in which the peasantry still forms the tail of the bourgeoisie, and in which the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats have not yet given up their role as an appendage of the bourgeois government, as ‘His Majesty’ Lvov’s Opposition.

This hypothetical person would resemble a sweetish Louis Blanc, or a sugary Kautskyite, but certainly not a revolutionary Marxist.

But are we not in danger of falling into subjectivism, of wanting to arrive at the socialist revolution by ‘skipping’ the bourgeois-democratic revolution – which is not yet completed and has not yet exhausted the peasant movement?

I might be incurring this danger if I said: “No Tsar, but a workers’ government.” But I did not say that, I said something else. I said that there can be no government (barring a bourgeois government) in Russia other than that of the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. I said that power in Russia now can pass from Guchkov and Lvov only to these Soviets. And in these Soviets, as it happens, it is the peasants, the soldiers, i.e. petty bourgeoisie, who preponderate, to use a scientific, Marxist term, a class characterisation, and not a common, man-in-the-street, professional characterisation.

In my theses, I absolutely ensured myself against skipping over the peasant movement, which has not outlived itself, or the petty-bourgeois movement in general, against any playing at ‘seizure of power’ by a workers’ government, against any kind of Blanquist^[13] adventurism; for I pointedly referred to the experience of the Paris Commune. And this experience, as we know, and as Marx proved at length in 1871 and Engels in 1891,^[14] absolutely excludes Blanquism, absolutely ensures the direct, immediate and unquestionable rule of the majority and the activity of the masses only to the extent that the majority itself acts consciously.

In the theses, I very definitely reduced the question to one of a struggle for influence within the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. To leave no shadow of doubt on this score, I twice emphasised in the theses the need for patient and persistent “explanatory” work “adapted to the practical needs of the masses”.

Ignorant persons or renegades from Marxism, like Mr. Plekhanov, may shout about anarchism, Blanquism and so forth. But those who want to think and learn cannot fail to understand that Blanquism means the seizure of power by a minority, whereas the Soviets are admittedly the direct and immediate organisation of the majority of the people. Work confined to a struggle for influence within these Soviets cannot, simply cannot, stray into the swamp of Blanquism. Nor can it stray into the swamp of anarchism, for anarchism denies the need for a state and state power in the period of transition from the rule of the bourgeoisie to the rule of the proletariat, whereas I, with a precision that precludes any possibility of misinterpretation, advocate the need for a state in this period, although, in accordance with Marx and the lessons of the Paris Commune, I advocate not the usual parliamentary bourgeois state, but a state without a standing army, without a police opposed to the people, without an officialdom placed above the people.

When Mr. Plekhanov, in his newspaper Yedinstvo, shouts with all his might that this is anarchism, he is merely giving further proof of his break with Marxism. Challenged by me in Pravda, No. 26, to tell us what Marx and Engels taught on the subject in 1871, 1872 and 1875,^[15] Mr. Plekhanov can only preserve silence on the question at issue and shout out abuse after the manner of the enraged bourgeoisie.

Mr. Plekhanov, the ex-Marxist, has absolutely failed to understand the Marxist doctrine of the state. Incidentally, the germs of this lack of understanding are also to be found in his German pamphlet on anarchism.^[16]

* * *

Now let us see how Comrade L Kamenev, in Pravda, No. 27, formulates his ‘disagreements’ with my theses and with the views expressed above. This will help us to grasp them more clearly.

As for Comrade Lenin’s general scheme, [writes Comrade Kamenev,] it appears to us unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution.

There are two big mistakes here.

First. The question of ‘completion’ of the bourgeois-democratic revolution is stated wrongly. The question is put in an abstract, simple, so to speak one-colour, way, which does not correspond to the objective reality. To put the question this way, to ask now ‘whether the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed’ and say no more, is to prevent oneself from seeing the exceedingly complex reality, which, is at least two-coloured. This is in theory. In practice, it means surrendering helplessly to petty-bourgeois revolutionism.

Indeed, reality shows us both the passing of power into the hands of the bourgeoisie (a ‘completed’ bourgeois-democratic revolution of the usual type) and, side by side with the real government, the existence of a parallel government which represents the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. This ‘second government’ has itself ceded the power to the bourgeoisie, has chained itself to the bourgeois government.

Is this reality covered by Comrade Kamenev’s old-Bolshevik formula, which says that ‘the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed’?

It is not. The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it.

Second. A practical question. Who knows whether it is still possible at present for a special ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, detached from the bourgeois government, to emerge in Russia? Marxist tactics cannot be based on the unknown.

But if this is still possible, then there is one, and only one, way towards it, namely, an immediate, resolute, and irrevocable separation of the proletarian Communist elements from the petty-bourgeois elements.

Why?

Because the entire petty bourgeoisie has, not by chance but of necessity, turned towards chauvinism (=defencism), towards ‘support’ of the bourgeoisie, towards dependence on it, towards the fear of having to do without it, etc., etc.

How can the petty bourgeoisie be ‘pushed’ into power, if even now it can take the power, but does not want to?

This can be done only by separating the proletarian, the Communist, party, by waging a proletarian class struggle free from the timidity of those petty bourgeois. Only the consolidation of the proletarians who are free from the influence of the petty bourgeoisie in deed and not only in word can make the ground so hot under the feet of the petty bourgeoisie that it will be obliged under certain circumstances to take the power; it is even within the bounds of possibility that Guchkov and Milyukov – again under certain circumstances – will be for giving full and sole power to Chkheidze, Tsereteli, the SRs and Steklov, since, after all, these are ‘defencists’.

To separate the proletarian elements of the Soviets (i.e. the proletarian, Communist, party) from the petty-bourgeois elements right now, immediately and irrevocably, is to give correct expression to the interests of the movement in either of two possible events: in the event that Russia will yet experience a special ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ independent of the bourgeoisie, and in the event that the petty bourgeoisie will not be able to tear itself away from the bourgeoisie and will oscillate eternally (that is, until socialism is established) between us and it.

To be guided in one’s activities merely by the simple formula, ‘the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed’, is like taking it upon oneself to guarantee that the petty bourgeoisie is definitely capable of being independent of the bourgeoisie. To do so is to throw oneself at the given moment on the mercy of the petty bourgeoisie.

Incidentally, in connection with the ‘formula’ of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, it is worth mentioning that, in Two Tactics (July 1905), I made a point of emphasising this:

Like everything else in the world, the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has a past and a future. Its past is autocracy, serfdom, monarchy and privilege. […]

Its future is the struggle against private property, the struggle of the wage-worker against the employer, the struggle for socialism.^[17]

Comrade Kamenev’s mistake is that even in 1917 he sees only the past of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. As a matter of fact its future has already begun, for the interests and policies of the wage-worker and the petty proprietor have actually diverged already, even in such an important question as that of ‘defencism’, that of the attitude towards the imperialist war.

This brings me to the second mistake in Comrade Kamenev’s argument quoted above. He criticises me, saying that my scheme “builds” on “the immediate transformation of this [bourgeois-democratic] revolution into a socialist revolution”.

This is incorrect. I not only do not “build” on the “immediate transformation” of our revolution into a socialist one, but I actually warn against it, when in Thesis No. 8, I state: “It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism…”^[18]

Is it not clear that no person who builds on the immediate transformation of our revolution into a socialist revolution could be opposed to the immediate task of introducing socialism?

Moreover, even a ‘commune state’ (i.e. a state organised along the lines of the Paris Commune) cannot be introduced in Russia ‘immediately’, because to do that it would be necessary for the majority of the deputies in all (or in most) Soviets to clearly recognise all the erroneousness and harm of the tactics and policy pursued by the SRs, Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, etc. As for me, I declared unmistakably that in this respect I ‘build’ only on ‘patient’ explaining (does one have to be patient to bring about a change which can be effected ‘immediately’?).

Comrade Kamenev has somewhat overreached himself in his eagerness, and has repeated the bourgeois prejudice about the Paris Commune having wanted to introduce socialism ‘immediately’. This is not so. The Commune, unfortunately, was too slow in introducing socialism. The real essence of the Commune is not where the bourgeois usually looks for it, but in the creation of a state of a special type. Such a state has already arisen in Russia, it is the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies!

Comrade Kamenev has not pondered on the fact, the significance, of the existing Soviets, their identity, in point of type and socio-political character, with the commune state, and instead of studying the fact, he began to talk about something I was supposed to be ‘building’ on for the ‘immediate’ future. The result is, unfortunately, a repetition of the method used by many bourgeois: from the question as to what are the Soviets, whether they are of a higher type than a parliamentary republic, whether they are more useful for the people, more democratic, more convenient for the struggle, for combating, for instance, the grain shortage, etc. – from this real, urgent, vital issue, attention is diverted to the empty, would-be scientific, but actually hollow, professorially dead question of ‘building on an immediate transformation’.

An idle question falsely presented. I ‘build’ only on this, exclusively on this – that the workers, soldiers and peasants will deal better than the officials, better than the police, with the difficult practical problems of producing more grain, distributing it better and keeping the soldiers better supplied, etc., etc.

I am deeply convinced that the Soviets will make the independent activity of the masses a reality more quickly and effectively than will a parliamentary republic (I shall compare the two types of states in greater detail in another letter). They will more effectively, more practically and more correctly decide what steps can be taken towards socialism and how these steps should be taken. Control over a bank, the merging of all banks into one, is not yet socialism, but it is a step towards socialism. Today such steps are being taken in Germany by the Junkers and the bourgeoisie against the people. Tomorrow the Soviet will be able to take these steps more effectively for the benefit of the people if the whole state power is in its hands.

What compels such steps?

Famine. Economic disorganisation. Imminent collapse. The horrors of war. The horrors of the wounds inflicted on mankind by the war.

Comrade Kamenev concludes his article with the remark that:

… in a broad discussion he hopes to carry his point of view, which is the only possible one for revolutionary Social-Democracy if it wishes to and should remain to the very end the party of the revolutionary masses of the proletariat and not turn into a group of Communist propagandists.

It seems to me that these words betray a completely erroneous estimate of the situation. Comrade Kamenev contraposes to a “party of the masses” a “group of propagandists”. But the “masses” have now succumbed to the craze of ‘revolutionary’ defencism. Is it not more becoming for internationalists at this moment to show that they can resist ‘mass’ intoxication rather than to ‘wish to remain’ with the masses, i.e. to succumb to the general epidemic? Have we not seen how in all the belligerent countries of Europe the chauvinists tried to justify themselves on the grounds that they wished to ‘remain with the masses’? Must we not be able to remain for a time in the minority against the ‘mass’ intoxication? Is it not the work of the propagandists at the present moment that forms the key point for disentangling the proletarian line from the defencist and petty-bourgeois ‘mass’ intoxication? It was this fusion of the masses, proletarian and non-proletarian, regardless of class differences within the masses, that formed one of the conditions for the defencist epidemic. To speak contemptuously of a ‘group of propagandists’ advocating a proletarian line does not seem to be very becoming.

The Dual Power

Published 9 (22) April 1917

The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.

The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old ‘formulas’, for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.

What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing – the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

What is the class composition of this other government? It consists of the proletariat and the peasants (in soldiers’ uniforms). What is the political nature of this government? It is a revolutionary dictatorship, i.e. a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralised state power. It is an entirely different kind of power from the one that generally exists in the parliamentary bourgeois-democratic republics of the usual type still prevailing in the advanced countries of Europe and America. This circumstance often overlooked, often not given enough thought, yet it is the crux of the matter. This power is of the same type as the Paris Commune of 1871. The fundamental characteristics of this type are:

1. The source of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas – direct ‘seizure’, to use a current expression;
2. The replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves;
3. Officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people’s first demand; they are reduced to the position of simple agents; from a privileged group holding ‘jobs’ remunerated on a high, bourgeois scale, they become workers of a special ‘arm of the service’, whose remuneration does not exceed the ordinary pay of a competent worker.

This, and this alone, constitutes the essence of the Paris Commune as a special type of state. This essence has been forgotten or perverted by the Plekhanovs (downright chauvinists who have betrayed Marxism), the Kautskys (the men of the ‘Centre’, i.e. those who vacillate between chauvinism and Marxism), and generally by all those Social-Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc., etc., who now rule the roost.

They are trying to get away with empty phrases, evasions, subterfuges; they congratulate each other a thousand times upon the revolution, but refuse to consider what the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies are. They refuse to recognise the obvious truth that in as much as these Soviets exist, in as much as they are a power, we have in Russia a state of the type of the Paris Commune.

I have emphasised the words ‘in as much as’, for it is only an incipient power. By direct agreement with the bourgeois Provisional Government and by a series of actual concessions, it has itself surrendered and is surrendering its positions to the bourgeoisie.

Why? Is it because Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov and co. are making a ‘mistake’? Nonsense. Only a philistine can think so – not a Marxist. The reason is insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletarians and peasants. The ‘mistake’ of the leaders I have named lies in their petty-bourgeois position, in the fact that instead of clarifying the minds of the workers, they are befogging them; instead of dispelling petty-bourgeois illusions, they are instilling them; instead of freeing the people from bourgeois influence, they are strengthening that influence.

It should be clear from this why our comrades, too, make so many mistakes when putting the question ‘simply’: Should the Provisional Government be overthrown immediately?

My answer is:

1. It should be overthrown, for it is an oligarchic, bourgeois, and not a people’s government, and is unable to provide peace, bread, or full freedom;
2. It cannot be overthrown just now, for it is being kept in power by a direct and indirect, a formal and actual agreement with the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, and primarily with the chief Soviet, the Petrograd Soviet;
3. Generally, it can not be ‘overthrown’ in the ordinary way, for it rests on the ‘support’ given to the bourgeoisie by the second government – the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and that government is the only possible revolutionary government, which directly expresses the mind and will of the majority of the workers and peasants. Humanity has not yet evolved and we do not as yet know a type of government superior to and better than the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side. As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blanquists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority. We are Marxists, we stand for proletarian class struggle against petty-bourgeois intoxication, against chauvinism-defencism, phrase-mongering and dependence on the bourgeoisie.

Let us create a proletarian Communist Party; its elements have already been created by the best adherents of Bolshevism; let us rally our ranks for proletarian class work; and larger and larger numbers from among the proletarians, from among the poorest peasants will range themselves on our side. For actual experience will from day to day shatter the petty-bourgeois illusions of those ‘Social-Democrats’, the Chkheidzes, Tseretelis, Steklovs and others, the ‘Socialist-Revolutionaries’, the petty bourgeoisie of an even purer water, and so on and so forth.

The bourgeoisie stands for the undivided power of the bourgeoisie.

The class-conscious workers stand for the undivided power of the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies – for undivided power made possible not by adventurist acts, but by clarifying proletarian minds, by emancipating them from the influence of the bourgeoisie.

The petty bourgeoisie – ‘Social-Democrats’, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc. – vacillate and, thereby, hinder this clarification and emancipation.

This is the actual, the class alignment of forces that determines our tasks.

N Lenin

The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution

Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party

Written 10 (23) April 1917

The moment of history through which Russia is now passing is marked by the following main characteristics:

The class character of the revolution that has taken place

1. The old tsarist power, which represented only a handful of feudal landowners who commanded the entire state machinery (the army, the police and the bureaucracy), has been overthrown and removed, but not completely destroyed. The monarchy has not been formally abolished; the Romanov gang continues to hatch monarchist intrigues. The vast landed possessions of the feudal squirearchy have not been abolished.
2. State power in Russia has passed into the hands of a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie and landowners who had become bourgeois. To this extent the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia is completed.

   Having come to power, the bourgeoisie has formed a bloc (an alliance) with the overt monarchists, who are notorious for their exceptionally ardent support of Nicholas the Bloody and Stolypin the Hangman in 1906-14 (Guchkov and other politicians to the right of the Cadets). The new bourgeois government of Lvov and co. has attempted and has begun to negotiate with the Romanovs for the restoration of the monarchy in Russia. Behind a screen of revolutionary phrases, this government is appointing partisans of the old regime to key positions. It is striving to reform the whole machinery of state (the army, the police and the bureaucracy) as little as possible, and has turned it over to the bourgeoisie. The new government has already begun to hinder in every way the revolutionary initiative of mass action and the seizure of power by the people from below, which is the sole guarantee of the real success of the revolution.

   Up to now this government has not even fixed a date for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. It is not laying a finger on the landed estates, which form the material foundation of feudal tsarism. This government does not even contemplate starting an investigation into, and making public, the activities of the monopolist financial organisations, the big banks, the syndicates and cartels of the capitalists, etc. or instituting control over them.

   The key positions, the decisive ministerial posts in the new government (the Ministry of the Interior and the War Ministry, i.e. the command over the army, the police, the bureaucracy – the entire apparatus for oppressing the people) are held by outright monarchists and supporters of the system of big landed estates. The Cadets, those day-old republicans, republicans against their own will, have been assigned minor posts, having no direct relation to the command over the people or to the apparatus of state power. A Kerensky, a Trudovik and ‘would-be socialist’, has no function whatsoever, except to lull the vigilance and attention of the people with sonorous phrases.

   For all these reasons, the new bourgeois government does not deserve the confidence of the proletariat even in the sphere of internal policy, and no support of this government by the proletariat is admissible.

   The foreign policy of the new government

3. In the field of foreign policy, which has now been brought to the forefront by objective circumstances, the new government is a government for the continuation of the imperialist war, a war that is being waged in alliance with the imperialist powers – Britain, France and others – for division of the capitalist spoils and for subjugating small and weak nations.

   Subordinated to the interests of Russian capitalism and its powerful protector and master – Anglo-French imperialist capitalism, the wealthiest in the world – the new government, notwithstanding the wishes expressed in no uncertain fashion on behalf of the obvious majority of the peoples of Russia through the Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies, has taken no real steps to put an end to the slaughter of peoples for the interests of the capitalists. It has not even published the secret treaties of an obviously predatory character (for the partition of Persia, the plunder of China, the plunder of Turkey, the partition of Austria, the annexation of Eastern Prussia, the annexation of the German colonies, etc.), which, as everybody knows, bind Russia to Anglo-French predatory imperialist capital. It has confirmed these treaties concluded by tsarism, which for centuries robbed and oppressed more nations than other tyrants and despots, and which not only oppressed, but also disgraced and demoralised the Great-Russian nation by making it an executioner of other nations.

   The new government has confirmed these shameful depredatory treaties and has not proposed an immediate armistice to all the belligerent nations, in spite of the clearly expressed demand of the majority of the peoples of Russia, voiced through the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. It has evaded the issue with the help of solemn, sonorous, bombastic, but absolutely empty declarations and phrases, which, in the mouths of bourgeois diplomats, have always served, and still serve, to deceive the trustful and naive masses of the oppressed people.

4. Not only, therefore, is the new government unworthy of the slightest confidence in the field of foreign policy, but to go on demanding that it should proclaim the will of the peoples of Russia for peace, that it should renounce annexations, and so on and so forth, is in practice merely to deceive the people, to inspire them with false hopes and to retard the clarification of their minds. It is indirectly to reconcile them to the continuation of a war the true social character of which is determined not by pious wishes, but by the class character of the government that wages the war, by the connection between the class represented by this government and the imperialist finance capital of Russia, Britain, France, etc. by the real and actual policy which that class is pursuing.

   The peculiar nature of the dual power and its class significance

5. The main feature of our revolution, a feature that most imperatively demands thoughtful consideration, is the dual power which arose in the very first days after the triumph of the revolution.

   This dual power is evident in the existence of two governments: one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the ‘Provisional Government’ of Lvov and co., which holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a supplementary and parallel government, a ‘controlling’ government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers.

   The class origin and the class significance of this dual power is the following: the Russian Revolution of March 1917 not only swept away the whole tsarist monarchy, not only transferred the entire power to the bourgeoisie, but also moved close towards a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The Petrograd and the other, the local, Soviets constitute precisely such a dictatorship (that is, a power resting not on the law but directly on the force of armed masses of the population), a dictatorship precisely of the above-mentioned classes.

6. The second highly important feature of the Russian Revolution is the fact that the Petrograd Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies, which, as everything goes to show, enjoys the confidence of most of the local Soviets, is voluntarily transferring state power to the bourgeoisie and its Provisional Government, is voluntarily ceding supremacy to the latter, having entered into an agreement to support it, and is limiting its own role to that of an observer, a supervisor of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly (the date for which has not even been announced as yet by the Provisional Government).

   This remarkable feature, unparalleled in history in such a form, has led to the interlocking of two dictatorships: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (for the government of Lvov and co. is a dictatorship, i.e. a power based not on the law, not on the previously expressed will of the people, but on seizure by force, accomplished by a definite class, namely, the bourgeoisie) and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry (the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies).

   There is not the slightest doubt that such an ‘interlocking’ cannot last long. Two powers cannot exist in a state. One of them is bound to pass away; and the entire Russian bourgeoisie is already trying its hardest everywhere and in every way to keep out and weaken the Soviets, to reduce them to nought, and to establish the undivided power of the bourgeoisie.

   The dual power merely expresses a transitional phase in the revolution’s development, when it has gone farther than the ordinary bourgeois-democratic revolution, but has not yet reached a ‘pure’ dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

   The class significance (and the class explanation) of this transitional and unstable situation is this: like all revolutions, our revolution required the greatest heroism and self-sacrifice on the part of the people for the struggle against tsarism; it also immediately drew unprecedentedly vast numbers of ordinary citizens into the movement.

   From the point of view of science and practical politics, one of the chief symptoms of every real revolution is the unusually rapid, sudden and abrupt increase in the number of ‘ordinary citizens’ who begin to participate actively, independently and effectively in political life and in the organisation of the state.

   Such is the case in Russia. Russia at present is seething. Millions and tens of millions of people, who had been politically dormant for ten years and politically crushed by the terrible oppression of tsarism and by inhuman toil for the landowners and capitalists, have awakened and taken eagerly to politics. And who are these millions and tens of millions? For the most part small proprietors, petty bourgeois, people standing midway between the capitalists and the wage-workers. Russia is the most petty-bourgeois of all European countries.

   A gigantic petty-bourgeois wave has swept over everything and overwhelmed the class-conscious proletariat, not only by force of numbers but also ideologically; that is, it has infected and imbued very wide circles of workers with the petty-bourgeois political outlook.

   The petty bourgeoisie are in real life dependent upon the bourgeoisie, for they live like masters and not like proletarians (from the point of view of their place in social production) and follow the bourgeoisie in their outlook.

   An attitude of unreasoning trust in the capitalists – the worst foes of peace and socialism – characterises the politics of the popular masses in Russia at the present moment; this is the fruit that has grown with revolutionary rapidity on the social and economic soil of the most petty-bourgeois of all European countries. This is the class basis for the ‘agreement’ between the Provisional Government and the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (I emphasise that I am referring not so much to the formal agreement as to actual support, a tacit agreement, the surrender of power inspired by unreasoning trust), an agreement which has given the Guchkovs a fat piece – real power – and the Soviet merely promises and honours (for the time being), flattery, phrases, assurances and the bowings and scrapings of the Kerenskys.

   On the other side we have the inadequate numerical strength of the proletariat in Russia and its insufficient class-consciousness and organisation.

   All the Narodnik parties, including the Socialist-Revolutionaries, have always been petty-bourgeois.^[19] This is also true of the party of the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.). The non-party revolutionaries (Steklov and others) have similarly yielded to the tide, or have not been able to stand up to it, have not had the time to do it.

   The peculiar nature of the tactics which flow from the above

7. For the Marxist, who must reckon with objective facts, with the masses and classes, and not with individuals and so on, the peculiar nature of the actual situation as described above must determine the peculiar nature of the tactics for the present moment.

   This peculiarity of the situation calls, in the first place, for the ‘pouring of vinegar and bile into the sweet water of revolutionary-democratic phraseology’ (as my fellow member on the Central Committee of our Party, Teodorovich, so aptly put it at yesterday’s session of the All-Russia Congress of Railwaymen in Petrograd). Our work must be one of criticism, of explaining the mistakes of the petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionary and Social-Democratic parties, of preparing and welding the elements of a consciously proletarian Communist Party and of curing the proletariat of the ‘general’ petty-bourgeois intoxication.

   This seems to be ‘nothing more’ than propaganda work, but in reality it is most practical revolutionary work; for there is no advancing a revolution that has come to a standstill, that has choked itself with phrases and that keeps ‘marking time’, not because of external obstacles, not because of the violence of the bourgeoisie (Guchkov is still only threatening to employ violence against the soldier mass), but because of the unreasoning trust of the people.

   Only by overcoming this unreasoning trust (and we can and should overcome it only ideologically, by comradely persuasion, by pointing to the lessons of experience) can we set ourselves free from the prevailing orgy of revolutionary phrase-mongering and really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the mass in general, as well as their bold and determined initiative in the localities – the independent realisation, development and consolidation of liberties, democracy and the principle of people’s ownership of all the land.

8. The world-wide experience of bourgeois and landowner governments has evolved two methods of keeping the people in subjection. The first is violence. Nicholas Romanov I, nicknamed Nicholas of the Big Stick, and Nicholas II, the Bloody, demonstrated to the Russian people the maximum of what can and cannot be done in the way of these hangmen’s practices. But there is another method, best developed by the British and French bourgeoisie, who ‘learned their lesson’ in a series of great revolutions and revolutionary movements of the masses. It is the method of deception, flattery, fine phrases, promises by the million, petty sops and concessions of the unessential while retaining the essential.

   The peculiar feature of the present situation in Russia is the transition at a dizzy speed from the first method to the second, from violent oppression of the people to flattering and deceiving the people by promises. Vaska the Cat listens, but goes on eating.^[20] Milyukov and Guchkov are holding power, they are protecting the profits of the capitalists, conducting an imperialist war in the interests of Russian and Anglo-French capital, and trying to get away with promises, declamation and bombastic statements in reply to the speeches of ‘cooks’ like Chkheidze, Tsereteli and Steklov, who threaten, exhort, conjure, beseech, demand and proclaim… Vaska the Cat listens, but goes on eating.

   But from day to day trustful lack of reasoning and unreasoning trust will be falling away, especially among the proletarians and poor peasants, who are being taught by experience (by their social and economic position) to distrust the capitalists.

   The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie ‘must’ teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie.

   Revolutionary defencism and its class significance

9. Revolutionary defencism must be regarded as the most important, the most striking manifestation of the petty-bourgeois wave that has swept over ‘nearly everything’. It is the worst enemy of the further progress and success of the Russian Revolution.

   Those who have yielded on this point and have been unable to extricate themselves are lost to the revolution. But the masses yield in a different way from the leaders, and they extricate themselves differently, by a different course of development, by different means.

   Revolutionary defencism is, on the one hand, a result of the deception of the masses by the bourgeoisie, a result of the trustful lack of reasoning on the part of the peasants and a section of the workers; it is, on the other, an expression of the interests and point of view of the small proprietor, who is to some extent interested in annexations and bank profits, and who ‘sacredly’ guards the traditions of tsarism, which demoralised the Great Russians by making them do a hangman’s work against the other peoples.

   The bourgeoisie deceives the people by working on their noble pride in the revolution and by pretending that the social and political character of the war, as far as Russia is concerned, underwent a change because of this stage of the revolution, because of the substitution of the near republic of Guchkov and Milyukov for the tsarist monarchy. And the people believed it – for a time – largely owing to age-old prejudices, which made them look upon the other peoples of Russia, i.e. the non-Great Russians, as something in the nature of a property and private estate of the Great Russians. This vile demoralisation of the Great Russian people by tsarism which taught them to regard the other peoples as something inferior, something belonging ‘by right’ to Great Russia, could not disappear instantly.

   What is required of us is the ability to explain to the masses that the social and political character of the war is determined not by the ‘good will’ of individuals or groups, or even of nations, but by the position of the class which conducts the war, by the class policy of which the war is a continuation, by the ties of capital, which is the dominant economic force in modern society, by the imperialist character of international capital, by Russia’s dependence in finance, banking and diplomacy upon Britain, France and so on. To explain this skilfully in a way the people would understand is not easy; none of us would be able to do it at once without committing errors.

   But this, and only this, must be the aim or, rather, the message of our propaganda. The slightest concession to revolutionary defencism is a betrayal of socialism, a complete renunciation of internationalism, no matter by what fine phrases and ‘practical’ considerations it may be justified.

   The slogan ‘Down with the War!’ is, of course, correct. But it fails to take into account the specific nature of the tasks of the present moment and the necessity of approaching the broad mass of the people in a different way. It reminds me of the slogan ‘Down with the Tsar!’ with which the inexperienced agitator of the ‘good old days’ went simply and directly to the countryside – and got a beating for his pains. The mass believers in revolutionary defencism are honest, not in the personal, but in the class sense, i.e. they belong to classes (workers and the peasant poor) which in actual fact have nothing to gain from annexations and the subjugation of other peoples. This is nothing like the bourgeois and the ‘intellectual’ fraternity, who know very well that you cannot renounce annexations without renouncing the rule of capital, and who unscrupulously deceive the people with fine phrases, with unlimited promises and endless assurances.

   The rank-and-file believer in defencism regards the matter in the simple way of the man in the street: “I don’t want annexations, but the Germans are ‘going for’ me, therefore I’m defending a just cause and not any kind of imperialist interests at all”. To a man like this it must be explained again and again that it is not a question of his personal wishes, but of mass, class, political relations and conditions, of the connection between the war and the interests of capital and the international network of banks, and so forth. Only such a struggle against defencism will be serious and will promise success – perhaps not a very rapid success, but one that will be real and enduring.

   How can the war be ended?

10. The war cannot be ended ‘at will’. It cannot be ended by the decision of one of the belligerents. It cannot be ended by ‘sticking your bayonet into the ground’, as one soldier, a defencist, expressed it.

    The war cannot be ended by an ‘agreement’ among the socialists of the various countries, by the ‘action’ of the proletarians of all countries, by the ‘will’ of the peoples, and so forth. All the phrases of this kind, which fill the articles of the defencist, semi-defencist and semi-internationalist papers as well as innumerable resolutions, appeals, manifestos and the resolutions of the Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies – all such phrases are nothing but idle, innocent and pious wishes of the petty bourgeois. There is nothing more harmful than phrases like ‘ascertaining the will of the peoples for peace’, like the sequence of revolutionary actions of the proletariat (after the Russian proletariat comes the turn of the German), etc. All this is Blancism, fond dreams, a playing at ‘political campaigning’, and in reality just a repetition of the fable of Vaska the Cat.

    The war is not a product of the evil will of rapacious capitalists, although it is undoubtedly being fought only in their interests and they alone are being enriched by it. The war is a product of half a century of development of world capitalism and of its billions of threads and connections. It is impossible to slip out of the imperialist war and achieve a democratic, non-coercive peace without overthrowing the power of capital and transferring state power to another class, the proletariat.

    The Russian Revolution of February-March 1917 was the beginning of the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. This revolution took the first step towards ending the war; but it requires a second step, namely, the transfer of state power to the proletariat, to make the end of the war a certainty. This will be the beginning of a ‘breakthrough’ on a world-wide scale, a breakthrough in the front of capitalist interests; and only by breaking through this front can the proletariat save mankind from the horrors of war and endow it with the blessings of peace.

    It is directly to such a ‘breakthrough’ in the front of capitalism that the Russian Revolution has already brought the Russian proletariat by creating the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.

    A new type of state emerging from our revolution

11. The Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, Peasants’ and other Deputies are not understood, not only in the sense that their class significance, their role in the Russian revolution, is not clear to the majority. They are not understood also in the sense that they constitute a new form or rather a new type of state.

    The most perfect, the most advanced type of bourgeois state is the parliamentary democratic republic: power is vested in parliament; the state machine, the apparatus and organ of administration, is of the customary kind: the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy – which in practice is undisplaceable, is privileged and stands above the people.

    Since the end of the nineteenth century, however, revolutionary epochs have advanced a higher type of democratic state, a state which in certain respects, as Engels put it, ceases to be a state, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”.^[21] This is a state of the Paris Commune type, one in which a standing army and police divorced from the people are replaced by the direct arming of the people themselves. It is this feature that constitutes the very essence of the Commune, which has been so misrepresented and slandered by the bourgeois writers, and to which has been erroneously ascribed, among other things, the intention of immediately ‘introducing’ socialism.

    This is the type of state which the Russian Revolution began to create in 1905 and in 1917. A Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, Peasants’ and other Deputies, united in an All-Russia Constituent Assembly of people’s representatives or in a Council of Soviets, etc. is what is already being realised in our country now, at this juncture. It is being realised by the initiative of the nation’s millions, who are creating a democracy on their own, in their own way without waiting until the Cadet professors draft their legislative bills for a parliamentary bourgeois republic, or until the pedants and routine-worshippers of petty-bourgeois ‘Social-Democracy’, like Mr. Plekhanov or Kautsky, stop distorting the Marxist teaching on the state.

    Marxism differs from anarchism in that it recognises the need for a state and for state power in the period of revolution in general, and in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism in particular.

    Marxism differs from the petty-bourgeois, opportunist ‘Social-Democratism’ of Plekhanov, Kautsky and co. in that it recognises that what is required during these two periods is not a state of the usual parliamentary bourgeois republican type, but a state of the Paris Commune type.

    The main distinctions between a state of the latter type and the old state are as follows.

    It is quite easy (as history proves) to revert from a parliamentary bourgeois republic to a monarchy, for all the machinery of oppression – the army, the police and the bureaucracy – is left intact. The Commune and the Soviet smash that machinery and do away with it.

    The parliamentary bourgeois republic hampers and stifles the independent political life of the masses – their direct participation in the democratic organisation of the life of the state from the bottom up. The opposite is the case with the Soviets.

    The latter reproduce the type of state which was being evolved by the Paris Commune and which Marx described as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour”.^[22]

    We are usually told that the Russian people are not yet prepared for the ‘introduction’ of the Commune. This was the argument of the serf-owners when they claimed that the peasants were not prepared for emancipation. The Commune, i.e. the Soviets, does not ‘introduce’, does not intend to ‘introduce’, and must not introduce any reforms which have not absolutely matured both in economic reality and in the minds of the overwhelming majority of the people. The deeper the economic collapse and the crisis produced by the war, the more urgent becomes the need for the most perfect political form, which will facilitate the healing of the terrible wounds inflicted on mankind by the war. The less the organisational experience of the Russian people, the more resolutely must we proceed to organisational development by the people themselves and not merely by the bourgeois politicians and ‘well-placed’ bureaucrats.

    The sooner we shed the old prejudices of pseudo-Marxism, a Marxism falsified by Plekhanov, Kautsky and co., the more actively we set about helping the people to organise Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies everywhere and immediately, and helping the latter to take life in its entirety under their control, and the longer Lvov and co. delay the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the easier will it be for the people (through the medium of the Constituent Assembly, or independently of it, if Lvov delays its convocation too long) to cast their decision in favour of a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. Errors in the new work of organisational development by the people themselves are at first inevitable; but it is better to make mistakes and go forward than to wait until the professors of law summoned by Mr. Lvov draft their laws for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, for the perpetuation of the parliamentary bourgeois republic and for the strangling of the Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.

    If we organise ourselves and conduct our propaganda skilfully, not only the proletarians, but nine-tenths of the peasants will be opposed to the restoration of the police, will be opposed to an undisplaceable and privileged bureaucracy and to an army divorced from the people. And that is all the new type of state stands for.

12. The substitution of a people’s militia for the police is a reform that follows from the entire course of the revolution and that is now being introduced in most parts of Russia. We must explain to the people that in most of the bourgeois revolutions of the usual type, this reform was always extremely short-lived, and that the bourgeoisie – even the most democratic and republican – restored the police of the old, tsarist type, a police divorced from the people, commanded by the bourgeoisie and capable of oppressing the people in every way.

    There is only one way to prevent the restoration of the police, and that is to create a people’s militia and to fuse it with the army (the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the entire people). Service in this militia should extend to all citizens of both sexes between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five without exception, if these tentatively suggested age limits may be taken as indicating the participation of adolescents and old people. Capitalists must pay their workers, servants, etc. for days devoted to public service in the militia. Unless women are brought to take an independent part not only in political life generally, but also in daily and universal public service, it is no use talking about full and stable democracy, let alone socialism. And such ‘police’ functions as care of the sick and of homeless children, food inspection, etc. will never be satisfactorily discharged until women are on an equal footing with men, not merely nominally but in reality.

    The tasks which the proletariat must put before the people in order to safeguard, consolidate and develop the revolution are prevention of the restoration of the police and enlistment of the organisational forces of the entire people in forming a people’s militia.

    The agrarian and national programmes

13. At the present moment we cannot say for certain whether a mighty agrarian revolution will develop in the Russian countryside in the near future. We cannot say exactly how profound the class cleavage is among the peasants, which has undoubtedly grown more profound of late as a division into agricultural labourers, wage-workers and poor peasants (‘semi-proletarians’), on the one hand, and wealthy and middle peasants (capitalists and petty capitalists), on the other. Such questions will be, and can be, decided only by experience.

    Being the party of the proletariat, however, we are unquestionably in duty bound not only immediately to advance an agrarian (land) programme but also to advocate practical measures which can be immediately realised in the interests of the peasant agrarian revolution in Russia.

    We must demand the nationalisation of all the land, i.e. that all the land in the state should become the property of the central state power. This power must fix the size, etc. of the resettlement land fund, pass legislation for the conservation of forests, for land improvement, etc. and absolutely prohibit any middlemen to interpose themselves between the owner of the land, i.e. the state, and the tenant, i.e. the tiller (prohibit all subletting of land). However, the disposal of the land, the determination of the local regulations governing ownership and tenure of land, must in no case be placed in the hands of bureaucrats and officials, but wholly and exclusively in the hands of the regional and local Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies.

    In order to improve grain production techniques and increase output, and in order to develop rational cultivation on a large scale under public control, we must strive within the peasants’ committees to secure the transformation of every confiscated landed estate into a large model farm controlled by the Soviet of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies.

    In order to counteract the petty-bourgeois phrase-mongering and the policy prevailing among the Socialist-Revolutionaries, particularly the idle talk about ‘subsistence’ standards or ‘labour’ standards, ‘socialisation of the land’, etc., the party of the proletariat must make it clear that small-scale farming under commodity production cannot save mankind from poverty and oppression.

    Without necessarily splitting the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies at once, the party of the proletariat must explain the need for organising separate Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and separate Soviets of deputies from the poor (semi-proletarian) peasants, or, at least, for holding regular separate conferences of deputies of this class status in the shape of separate groups or parties within the general Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies. Otherwise all the honeyed petty-bourgeois talk of the Narodniks regarding the peasants in general will serve as a shield for the deception of the propertyless mass by the wealthy peasants, who are merely a variety of capitalists.

    To counteract the bourgeois-liberal or purely bureaucratic sermons preached by many Socialist-Revolutionaries and Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, who advise the peasants not to seize the landed estates and not to start the agrarian reform pending the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, the party of the proletariat must urge the peasants to carry out the agrarian reform at once on their own, and to confiscate the landed estates immediately, upon the decisions of the peasants’ deputies in the localities.

    At the same time, it is most important to insist on the necessity of increasing food production for the soldiers at the front and for the towns, and on the absolute inadmissibility of causing any damage or injury to livestock, implements, machinery, buildings, etc.

14. As regards the national question, the proletarian party first of all must advocate the proclamation and immediate realisation of complete freedom of secession from Russia for all the nations and peoples who were oppressed by tsarism, or who were forcibly joined to, or forcibly kept within the boundaries of, the state, i.e. annexed.

    All statements, declarations and manifestos concerning renunciation of annexations that are not accompanied by the realisation of the right of secession in practice, are nothing but bourgeois deception of the people, or else pious petty-bourgeois wishes.

    The proletarian party strives to create as large a state as possible, for this is to the advantage of the working people; it strives to draw nations closer together, and bring about their further fusion; but it desires to achieve this aim not by violence, but exclusively through a free fraternal union of the workers and the working people of all nations.

    The more democratic the Russian republic, and the more successfully it organises itself into a Republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the more powerful will be the force of voluntary attraction to such a republic on the part of the working people of all nations.

    Complete freedom of secession, the broadest local (and national) autonomy, and elaborate guarantees of the rights of national minorities – this is the programme of the revolutionary proletariat.

    Nationalisation of the banks and capitalist syndicates

15. Under no circumstances can the party of the proletariat set itself the aim of ‘introducing’ socialism in a country of small peasants so long as the overwhelming majority of the population has not come to realise the need for a socialist revolution.

    But only bourgeois sophists, hiding behind ‘near-Marxist’ catchwords, can deduce from this truth a justification of the policy of postponing immediate revolutionary measures, the time for which is fully ripe; measures which have been frequently resorted to during the war by a number of bourgeois states, and which are absolutely indispensable in order to combat impending total economic disorganisation and famine.

    Such measures as the nationalisation of the land, of all the banks and capitalist syndicates, or, at least, the immediate establishment of the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, etc. over them – measures which do not in any way constitute the ‘introduction’ of socialism – must be absolutely insisted on, and, whenever possible, carried out in a revolutionary way. Without such measures, which are only steps towards socialism, and which are perfectly feasible economically, it will be impossible to heal the wounds caused by the war and to avert the impending collapse; and the party of the revolutionary proletariat will never hesitate to lay hands on the fabulous profits of the capitalists and bankers, who are enriching themselves on the war in a particularly scandalous manner.

    The situation within the Socialist International

16. The international obligations of the working class of Russia are precisely now coming to the forefront with particular force.

    Only lazy people do not swear by internationalism these days. Even the chauvinist defencists, even Plekhanov and Potresov, even Kerensky, call themselves internationalists. It becomes the duty of the proletarian party all the more urgently, therefore, to clearly, precisely and definitely counterpoise internationalism in deed to internationalism in word.

    Mere appeals to the workers of all countries, empty assurances of devotion to internationalism, direct or indirect attempts to fix a ‘sequence’ of action by the revolutionary proletariat in the various belligerent countries, laborious efforts to conclude ‘agreements’ between the socialists of the belligerent countries on the question of the revolutionary struggle, all the fuss over the summoning of socialist congresses for the purpose of a peace campaign, etc., etc. – no matter how sincere the authors of such ideas, attempts and plans may be – amount, as far as their objective significance is concerned, to mere phrase-mongering, and at best are innocent and pious wishes, fit only to conceal the deception of the people by the chauvinists. The French social-chauvinists, who are the most adroit and accomplished in methods of parliamentary hocus-pocus, have long since broken the record for ranting and resonant pacifist and internationalist phrases coupled with the incredibly brazen betrayal of socialism and the International, the acceptance of posts in governments which conduct the imperialist war, the voting of credits or loans (as Chkheidze, Skobelev, Tsereteli and Steklov have been doing recently in Russia), opposition to the revolutionary struggle in their own country, etc., etc.

    Good people often forget the brutal and savage setting of the imperialist world war. This setting does not tolerate phrases, and mocks at innocent and pious wishes.

    There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is – working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this, line, in every country without exception.

    Everything else is deception and Manilovism.^[23]

    During the two odd years of the war the international socialist and working-class movement in every country has evolved three trends. Whoever ignores reality and refuses to recognise the existence of these three trends, to analyse them, to fight consistently for the trend that is really internationalist, is doomed to impotence, helplessness and errors.

    The three trends are:

    1) The social-chauvinists, i.e. socialists in word and chauvinists in deed. People who support ‘defence of the fatherland’ in an imperialist war (and above all in the present imperialist war).

    These people are our class enemies. They have gone over to the bourgeoisie.

    They are the majority of the official leaders of the official Social-Democratic parties in all countries – Plekhanov and co. in Russia; the Scheidemanns in Germany; Renaudel, Guesde and Sembat in France; Bissolati and co. in Italy; Hyndman, the Fabians and the Labourites (the leaders of the ‘Labour Party’) in Britain; Branting and co. in Sweden; Troelstra and his party in Holland; Stauning and his party in Denmark; Victor Berger and the other ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in America and so forth.

    2) The second trend, known as the ‘Centre’, consists of people who vacillate between the social-chauvinists and the true internationalists.

    The ‘Centre’ all vow and declare that they are Marxists and internationalists, that they are for peace, for bringing every kind of ‘pressure’ to bear upon the governments, for ‘demanding’ in every way that their own government should ‘ascertain the will of the people for peace’, that they are for all sorts of peace campaigns, for peace without annexations, etc., etc. – and for peace with the social-chauvinists. The ‘Centre’ is for ‘unity’, the Centre is opposed to a split.

    The ‘Centre’ is a realm of honeyed petty-bourgeois phrases, of internationalism in word and cowardly opportunism and fawning on the social-chauvinists in deed.

    The crux of the matter is that the ‘Centre’ is not convinced of the necessity for a revolution against one’s own government; it does not preach revolution; it does not carry on a whole-hearted revolutionary struggle; and in order to evade such a struggle it resorts to the tritest ultra-‘Marxist’-sounding excuses.

    The social-chauvinists are our class enemies, they are bourgeois within the working-class movement. They represent a stratum, or groups, or sections of the working class which objectively have been bribed by the bourgeoisie (by better wages, positions of honour, etc.), and which help their own bourgeoisie to plunder and oppress small and weak peoples and to fight for the division of the capitalist spoils.

    The ‘Centre’ consists of routine-worshippers, eroded by the canker of legality, corrupted by the parliamentary atmosphere, etc. – bureaucrats accustomed to snug positions and soft jobs. Historically and economically speaking, they are not a separate stratum but represent only a transition from a past phase of the working-class movement – the phase between 1871 and 1914, which gave much that is valuable to the proletariat, particularly in the indispensable art of slow, sustained and systematic organisational work on a large and very large scale – to a new phase that became objectively essential with the outbreak of the first imperialist world war, which inaugurated the era of social revolution.

    The chief leader and spokesman of the ‘Centre’ is Karl Kautsky, the most outstanding authority in the Second International (1889 – 1914), since August 1914 a model of utter bankruptcy as a Marxist, the embodiment of unheard-of spinelessness, and the most wretched vacillations and betrayals. This ‘Centrist’ trend includes Kautsky, Haase, Ledebour and the so-called workers’ or labour group in the Reichstag; in France it includes Longuet, Pressemane and the so-called minorities (Mensheviks) in general; in Britain, Philip Snowden, Ramsay MacDonald and many other leaders of the Independent Labour Party, and some leaders of the British Socialist Party; Morris Hillquit and many others in the United States; Turati, Tréves, Modigliani and others in Italy; Robert Grimm and others in Switzerland; Victor Adler and co. in Austria; the party of the Organising Committee, Axelrod, Martov, Chkheidze, Tsereteli and others in Russia, and so forth.

    Naturally, at times individuals unconsciously drift from the social-chauvinist to the ‘Centrist’ position, and vice versa. Every Marxist knows that classes are distinct, even though individuals may move freely from one class to another; similarly, trends in political life are distinct in spite of the fact that individuals may change freely from one trend to another, and in spite of all attempts and efforts to amalgamate trends.

    3) The third trend, that of the true internationalists, is best represented by the ‘Zimmerwald Left’. (We reprint as a supplement its manifesto of September 1915, to enable the reader to learn of the inception of this trend at first hand.)^[24]

    Its distinctive feature is its complete break with both social-chauvinism and ‘Centrism’, and its gallant revolutionary struggle against its own imperialist government and its own imperialist bourgeoisie. Its principle is: ‘Our chief enemy is at home’. It wages a ruthless struggle against honeyed social-pacifist phrases (a social-pacifist is a socialist in word and a bourgeois pacifist in deed; bourgeois pacifists dream of an everlasting peace without the overthrow of the yoke and domination of capital) and against all subterfuges employed to deny the possibility, or the appropriateness, or the timeliness of a proletarian revolutionary struggle and of a proletarian socialist revolution in connection with the present war.

    The most outstanding representative of this trend in Germany is the Spartacus group or the Internationale group, to which Karl Liebknecht belongs. Karl Liebknecht is a most celebrated representative of this trend and of the new, and genuine, proletarian International.

    Karl Liebknecht called upon the workers and soldiers of Germany to turn their guns against their own government. Karl Liebknecht did that openly from the rostrum of parliament (the Reichstag). He then went to a demonstration in Potsdamer Platz, one of the largest public squares in Berlin, with illegally printed leaflets proclaiming the slogan ‘Down with the Government!’ He was arrested and sentenced to hard labour. He is now serving his term in a German convict prison, like hundreds, if not thousands, of other true German socialists who have been imprisoned for their anti-war activities.

    Karl Liebknecht in his speeches and letters mercilessly attacked not only his own Plekhanovs and Potresovs (Scheidemanns, Legiens, Davids and co.), but also his own Centrists, his own Chkheidzes and Tseretelis (Kautsky, Haase, Ledebour and co.).

    Karl Liebknecht and his friend Otto Rühle, two out of 110 deputies, violated discipline, destroyed the ‘unity’ with the ‘Centre’ and the chauvinists and went against all of them. Liebknecht alone represents socialism, the proletarian cause, the proletarian revolution. All the rest of German Social-Democracy, to quote the apt words of Rosa Luxemburg (also a member and one of the leaders of the Spartacus group), is a ‘stinking corpse’.

    Another group of true internationalists in Germany is that of the Bremen paper Arbeiterpolitik.

    Closest to the internationalists in deed are: in France, Loriot and his friends (Bourderon and Merrheim have slid down to social-pacifism), as well as the Frenchman Henri Guilbeaux, who publishes in Geneva the journal Demain; in Britain, the newspaper The Trade Unionist, and some of the members of the British Socialist Party and of the Independent Labour Party (for instance, Russell Williams, who openly called for a break with the leaders who have betrayed socialism), the Scottish socialist schoolteacher Maclean, who was sentenced to hard labour by the bourgeois government of Britain for his revolutionary fight against the war, and hundreds of British socialists who are in jail for the same offence. They, and they alone, are internationalists in deed. In the United States, the Socialist Labour Party and those within the opportunist Socialist Party who in January 1917 began publication of the paper, The Internationalist; in Holland, the Party of the ‘Tribunists’ which publishes the paper De Tribune (Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Wijnkoop and Henriette Roland-Holst, who, although Centrist at Zimmerwald, has now joined our ranks); in Sweden, the Party of the Young, or the Left, led by Lindhagen, Ture Nerman, Carleson, Ström and Z Höglund, who at Zimmerwald was personally active in the organisation of the ‘Zimmerwald Left’ and who is now in prison for his revolutionary fight against the war; in Denmark, Trier and his friends who have left the now purely bourgeois ‘Social-Democratic’ Party of Denmark, headed by the Minister Stauning; in Bulgaria, the ‘Tesnyaki’; in Italy, the nearest are Constantino Lazzari, secretary of the party, and Serrati, editor of the central organ Avanti!; in Poland, Radek, Hanecki and other leaders of the Social-Democrats united under the ‘Regional Executive’, and Rosa Luxemburg, Tyszka and other leaders of the Social-Democrats united under the ‘Chief Executive’; in Switzerland, those of the Left who drew up the argument for the ‘referendum’ (January 1917) in order to fight the social-chauvinists and the ‘Centre’ in their own country and who at the Zurich Cantonal Socialist Convention, held at Töss on 11 February 1917, moved a consistently revolutionary resolution against the war; in Austria, the young Left-wing friends of Friedrich Adler, who acted partly through the Karl Marx Club in Vienna, now closed by the arch-reactionary Austrian Government, which is ruining Adler’s life for his heroic though ill-considered shooting at a minister, and so on.

    It is not a question of shades of opinion, which certainly exist even among the Lefts. It is a question of trend. The thing is that it is not easy to be an internationalist in deed during a terrible imperialist war. Such people are few; but it is on such people alone that the future of socialism depends; they alone are the leaders of the people, and not their corrupters.

    The distinction between the reformists and the revolutionaries, among the Social-Democrats, and socialists generally, was objectively bound to undergo a change under the conditions of the imperialist war. Those who confine themselves to ‘demanding’ that the bourgeois governments should conclude peace or ‘ascertain the will of the peoples for peace’, etc., are actually slipping into reforms. For, objectively, the problem of the war can be solved only in a revolutionary way.

    There is no possibility of this war ending in a democratic, non-coercive peace or of the people being relieved of the burden of billions paid in interest to the capitalists, who have made fortunes out of the war, except through a revolution of the proletariat.

    The most varied reforms can and must be demanded of the bourgeois governments, but one cannot, without sinking to Manilovism and reformism, demand that people and classes entangled by the thousands of threads of imperialist capital should tear those threads. And unless they are torn, all talk of a war against war is idle and deceitful prattle.

    The ‘Kautskyites’, the ‘Centre’, are revolutionaries in word and reformists in deed, they are internationalists in word and accomplices of the social-chauvinists in deed.

    The collapse of the Zimmerwald International – The need for founding a Third International

17. From the very outset, the Zimmerwald International adopted a vacillating, ‘Kautskyite’, ‘Centrist’ position, which immediately compelled the Zimmerwald Left to dissociate itself, to separate itself from the rest and to issue its own manifesto (published in Switzerland in Russian, German and French).

    The chief shortcoming of the Zimmerwald International and the cause of its collapse (for politically and ideologically it has already collapsed), was its vacillation and indecision on such a momentous issue of crucial practical significance as that of breaking completely with social-chauvinism and the old social-chauvinist International, headed by Vandervelde and Huysmans at The Hague (Holland), etc.

    It is not as yet known in Russia that the Zimmerwald majority are nothing but Kautskyites. Yet this is the fundamental fact, one which cannot be ignored, and which is now generally known in Western Europe. Even that chauvinist, that extreme German chauvinist, Heilmann, editor of the ultra-chauvinistic Chemnitzer Volksstimme and contributor to Parvus’ ultra-chauvinistic Glocke (a ‘Social-Democrat’, of course, and an ardent partisan of Social-Democratic ‘unity’), was compelled to acknowledge in the press that the Centre, or ‘Kautskyism’, and the Zimmerwald majority were one and the same thing.

    This fact was definitely established at the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917. Although social-pacifism was condemned by the Kienthal Manifesto,^[25] the whole Zimmerwald Right, the entire Zimmerwald majority, sank to social-pacifism: Kautsky and co. in a series of utterances in January and February 1917; Bourderon and Merrheim in France, who cast their votes in unanimity with the social-chauvinists for the pacifist resolutions of the Socialist Party (December 1916) and of the Confédération Générale du Travail (the national organisation of the French trade unions, also in December 1916); Turati and co. in Italy, where the entire party took up a social-pacifist position, while Turati himself, in a speech delivered on 17 December 1916, ‘slipped’ (not by accident, of course) into nationalist phrases whitewashing the imperialist war.

    In January 1917, the chairman of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences, Robert Grimm, joined the social-chauvinists in his own party (Greulich, Pflüger, Gustav Mümller and others) against the internationalists in deed.

    At two conferences of Zimmerwaldists from various countries in January and February 1917, this equivocal, double-faced behaviour of the Zimmerwald majority was formally stigmatised by the Left internationalists of several countries: by Munzenberg, secretary of the international youth organisation and editor of the excellent internationalist publication Die Jugendinternationale; by Zinoviev, representative of the Central Committee of our Party; by K Radek of the Polish Social-Democratic Party (the ‘Regional Executive’) and by Hartstein,^[26] a German Social-Democrat and member of the Spartacus group.

    Much is given to the Russian proletariat; nowhere in the world has the working class yet succeeded in developing so much revolutionary energy as in Russia. But to whom much is given, of him much is required.

    The Zimmerwald bog can no longer be tolerated. We must not, for the sake of the Zimmerwald ‘Kautskyites’, continue the semi-alliance with the chauvinist International of the Plekhanovs and Scheidemanns. We must break with this International immediately. We must remain in Zimmerwald only for purposes of information.

    It is we who must found, and right now, without delay, a new, revolutionary, proletarian International, or rather, we must not fear to acknowledge publicly that this new International is already established and operating.

    This is the International of those ‘internationalists in deed’ whom I precisely listed above. They and they alone are representatives of the revolutionary, internationalist mass, and not their corrupters.

    And if socialists of that type are few, let every Russian worker ask himself whether there were many really class-conscious revolutionaries in Russia on the eve of the February-March revolution of 1917.

    It is not a question of numbers, but of giving correct expression to the ideas and policies of the truly revolutionary proletariat. The thing is not to ‘proclaim’ internationalism, but to be able to be an internationalist in deed, even when times are most trying.

    Let us not deceive ourselves with hopes of agreements and international congresses. As long as the imperialist war is on, international intercourse is held in the iron vice of the military dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeoisie. If even the ‘republican’ Milyukov, who is obliged to tolerate the parallel government of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, did not allow Fritz Platten, the Swiss socialist, secretary of the party, an internationalist and participant in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences, to enter Russia in April 1917, in spite of the fact that Platten has a Russian wife and was on his way to visit his wife’s relatives, and in spite of the fact that he had taken part in the Revolution of 1905 in Riga, for which he had been confined in a Russian prison, had given bail to the tsarist government for his release and wished to recover that bail – if the ‘republican’ Milyukov could do such a thing in April 1917 in Russia, one can judge what value can be put on the promises and assurances, the phrases and declarations of the bourgeoisie on the subject of peace without annexations, and so on.

    And the arrest of Trotsky by the British Government? And the refusal to allow Martov to leave Switzerland, and the attempt to lure him to Britain, where Trotsky’s fate awaits him?

    Let us harbour no illusions. We must not deceive ourselves.

    To ‘wait’ for international congresses or conferences is simply to betray internationalism, since it has been shown that even from Stockholm neither socialists loyal to internationalism nor even their letters are allowed to come here, although this is quite possible and although a ferocious military censorship exists.

    Our Party must not ‘wait’, but must immediately found a Third International. Hundreds of socialists imprisoned in Germany and Britain will then heave a sigh of relief, thousands and thousands of German workers who are now holding strikes and demonstrations that are frightening that scoundrel and brigand, Wilhelm, will learn from illegal leaflets of our decision, of our fraternal confidence in Karl Liebknecht, and in him alone, of our decision to fight ‘revolutionary defencism’ even now; they will read this and be strengthened in their revolutionary internationalism.

    To whom much is given, of him much is required. No other country in the world is as free as Russia is now. Let us make use of this freedom, not to advocate support for the bourgeoisie, or bourgeois ‘revolutionary defencism’, but in a bold, honest, proletarian, Liebknecht way to found the Third International, an International uncompromisingly hostile both to the social-chauvinist traitors and to the vacillating ‘Centrists’.

18. After what has been said, there is no need to waste many words explaining that the amalgamation of Social-Democrats in Russia is out of the question.

    It is better to remain with one friend only, like Liebknecht, and that means remaining with the revolutionary proletariat, than to entertain even for a moment any thought of amalgamation with the party of the Organising Committee, with Chkheidze and Tsereteli, who can tolerate a bloc with Potresov in Rabochaya Gazeta, who voted for the loan in the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies,^[27] and who have sunk to ‘defencism’.

    Let the dead bury their dead.

    Whoever wants to help the waverers must first stop wavering himself.

    What should be the name of our party – one that will be correct scientifically and help to clarify the mind of the proletariat politically?

19. I now come to the final point, the name of our Party. We must call ourselves the Communist Party – just as Marx and Engels called themselves.

    We must repeat that we are Marxists and that we take as our basis The Communist Manifesto, which has been distorted and betrayed by the Social-Democrats on its two main points: (1) the working men have no country: ‘defence of the fatherland’ in an imperialist war is a betrayal of socialism; and (2) the Marxist doctrine of the state has been distorted by the Second International.

    The name ‘Social-Democracy’ is scientifically incorrect, as Marx frequently pointed out, in particular, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, and as Engels re-affirmed in a more popular form in 1894.^[28] From capitalism mankind can pass directly only to socialism, i.e. to the social ownership of the means of production and the distribution of products according to the amount of work performed by each individual. Our Party looks farther ahead: socialism must inevitably evolve gradually into communism, upon the banner of which is inscribed the motto: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

    That is my first argument.

    Here is the second: the second part of the name of our Party (Social-Democrats) is also scientifically incorrect. Democracy is a form of state, whereas we Marxists are opposed to every kind of state.

    The leaders of the Second International (1889-1914), Plekhanov, Kautsky and their like, have vulgarised and distorted Marxism.

    Marxism differs from anarchism in that it recognises the need for a state for the purpose of the transition to socialism; but (and here is where we differ from Kautsky and co.) not a state of the type of the usual parliamentary bourgeois-democratic republic, but a state like the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies of 1905 and 1917.

    My third argument: living reality, the revolution, has already actually established in our country, albeit in a weak and embryonic form, precisely this new type of ‘state’, which is not a state in the proper sense of the word.

    This is already a matter of the practical action of the people, and not merely a theory of the leaders.

    The state in the proper sense of the term is domination over the people by contingents of armed men divorced from the people.

    Our emergent, new state is also a state, for we too need contingents of armed men, we too need the strictest order, and must ruthlessly crush by force all attempts at either a tsarist or a Guchkov-bourgeois counter-revolution.

    But our emergent, new state is no longer a state in the proper sense of the term, for in some parts of Russia these contingents of armed men are the masses themselves, the entire people, and not certain privileged persons placed over the people, and divorced from the people, and for all practical purposes undisplaceable.

    We must look forward, and not backward to the usual bourgeois type of democracy, which consolidated the rule of the bourgeoisie with the aid of the old, monarchist organs of administration, the police, the army and the bureaucracy.

    We must look forward to the emergent new democracy, which is already ceasing to be a democracy, for democracy means the domination of the people, and the armed people cannot dominate themselves.

    The term democracy is not only scientifically incorrect when applied to a Communist Party; it has now, since March 1917, simply become blinkers put on the eyes of the revolutionary people and preventing them from boldly and freely, on their own initiative, building up the new: the Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and all other Deputies, as the sole power in the ‘state’ and as the harbinger of the ‘withering away’ of the state in every form.

    My fourth argument: we must reckon with the actual situation in which socialism finds itself internationally.

    It is not what it was during the years 1871 to 1914, when Marx and Engels knowingly put up with the inaccurate, opportunist term ‘Social-Democracy’. For in those days, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, history made slow organisational and educational work the task of the day. Nothing else was possible. The anarchists were then (as they are now) fundamentally wrong not only theoretically, but also economically and politically. The anarchists misjudged the character of the times, for they failed to understand the world situation: the worker of Britain corrupted by imperialist profits, the Commune defeated in Paris, the recent (1871) triumph of the bourgeois national movement in Germany, the age-long sleep of semi-feudal Russia.

    Marx and Engels gauged the times accurately; they understood the international situation; they understood that the approach to the beginning of the social revolution must be slow.

    We, in our turn, must also understand the specific features and tasks of the new era. Let us not imitate those sorry Marxists of whom Marx said: “I have sown dragon’s teeth and harvested fleas”.^[29]

    The objective inevitability of capitalism which grew into imperialism brought about the imperialist war. The war has brought mankind to the brink of a precipice, to the brink of the destruction of civilisation, of the brutalisation and destruction of more millions, countless millions, of human beings.

    The only way out is through a proletarian revolution.

    At the very moment when such a revolution is beginning, when it is taking its first hesitant, groping steps, steps betraying too great a confidence in the bourgeoisie, at such a moment the majority (that is the truth, that is a fact) of the ‘Social-Democratic’ leaders, of the ‘Social-Democratic’ parliamentarians, of the ‘Social-Democratic’ newspapers – and these are precisely the organs that influence the people – have deserted socialism, have betrayed socialism and have gone over to the side of ‘their own’ national bourgeoisie.

    The people have been confused, led astray and deceived by these leaders.

    And we shall aid and abet that deception if we retain the old and out-of-date Party name, which is as decayed as the Second International!

    Granted that ‘many’ workers understand Social-Democracy in an honest way; but it is time to learn how to distinguish the subjective from the objective.

    Subjectively, such Social-Democratic workers are most loyal leaders of the proletarians.

    Objectively, however, the world situation is such that the old name of our Party makes it easier to fool the people and impedes the onward march; for at every step, in every paper, in every parliamentary group, the masses see leaders, i.e. people whose voices carry farthest and whose actions are most conspicuous; yet they are all ‘would-be Social-Democrats’, they are all ‘for unity’ with the betrayers of socialism, with the social-chauvinists; and they are all presenting for payment the old bills issued by ‘Social-Democracy’…

    And what are the arguments against?… “We’ll be confused with the Anarchist-Communists”, they say…

    Why are we not afraid of being confused with the Social-Nationalists, the Social-Liberals, or the Radical-Socialists, the foremost bourgeois party in the French Republic and the most adroit in the bourgeois deception of the people?… We are told: The people are used to it, the workers have come to ‘love’ their Social-Democratic Party.

    That is the only argument. But it is an argument that dismisses the science of Marxism, the tasks of the morrow in the revolution, the objective position of world socialism, the shameful collapse of the Second International, and the harm done to the practical cause by the packs of ‘would-be Social-Democrats’ who surround the proletarians.

    It is an argument of routinism, an argument of inertia, an argument of stagnation.

    But we are out to rebuild the world. We are out to put an end to the imperialist world war into which hundreds of millions of people have been drawn and in which the interests of billions and billions of capital are involved, a war which cannot end in a truly democratic peace without the greatest proletarian revolution in the history of mankind.

    Yet we are afraid of our own selves. We are loath to cast off the ‘dear old’ soiled shirt…

    But it is time to cast off the soiled shirt and to put on clean linen.

N Lenin,

Petrograd,

10 (23) April 1917

A Shameless Lie of the Capitalists

Written 11 (24) April 1917

It is not enough that the capitalist newspapers lie and carry on a riot-mongering campaign against Pravda, that Rech vies in this respect with Russkaya Volya – a paper which it cannot but despise.^[30]

Now the ministers of the capitalist government, too, have begun to speak in the language of Russkaya Volya. Rech quotes today Minister Nekrasov’s statement made before a meeting of the Cadet Party in Moscow on 9 (22) April: “The preaching of violence that comes from the Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt is a terrible thing.”

Re-echoing Russkaya Volya, the worthy Minister lies shamelessly, deceives the people, and aids the riot-mongers while hiding behind their backs. He dares not name directly a single person, a single newspaper, a single orator, or a single party.

The worthy Minister prefers dark hints – hoping that someone will fall for it!

But all politically minded people will understand that the worthy Minister is referring to the organ of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, Pravda and its followers.

You are lying, Mr. Minister, worthy member of the ‘people’s freedom’ party. It is Mr. Guchkov who is preaching violence when be threatens to punish the soldiers for dismissing the authorities. It is Russkaya Volya, the riot-mongering newspaper of the riot-mongering ‘republicans’, a paper that is friendly to you, that preaches violence.

Pravda and its followers do not preach violence. On the contrary, they declare most clearly, precisely and definitely that our main efforts should now be concentrated on explaining to the proletarian masses their proletarian problems, as distinguished from the petty bourgeoisie which has succumbed to chauvinist intoxication.

So long as you, capitalist gentlemen, Guchkov and co., confine yourselves only to threats of violence, so long as you have not yet resorted to violence, so long as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies exist, so long as you have not yet carried out your threats against the Soviets (such threats, for example, have actually been printed by Mr. Milyukov’s associate, Mr. Wilson, The Times correspondent), so long as you have not yet perpetrated violence upon the masses, we Pravdists declare and reiterate that we regard the Soviets as the only possible form of government.

So long as you, capitalist gentlemen, who are in control of the army command, have not yet begun to use violence, it is our tactics, the tactics of all Pravdists and of all our Party, to fight for influence among the proletarian masses, to fight for influence among the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, to show up the errors in their tactics, to show up all the falsity of the chauvinist (revolutionary-defencist) intoxication.

The worthy Minister Nekrasov knows this perfectly well, if only from the quotations which Rech itself was forced to print. The worthy Minister re-echoes Russkaya Volya; he is bent on preventing a calm demonstration of the truth by resorting to lies, slander, baiting and threats.

It won’t work, Messrs. Nekrasovs!

The workers and soldiers want to know the truth, they want to clear up for themselves the questions of war and peace, and state systems, and they will certainly do so.

The Provisional Government’s Note

Written 20 April (3 May) 1917

The cards are on the table. We have every reason to be grateful to Guchkov and Milyukov for their Note, printed today in all the newspapers.

The majority of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Narodniks, Mensheviks, all those who until now have appealed for confidence in the Provisional Government, have received fitting punishment. They hoped, expected and believed that the Provisional Government, under the beneficent influence of ‘contact’ with Chkheidze, Skobelev and Steklov, would forever repudiate annexations. Things have turned out somewhat differently…

In its Note of 18 April (1 May), the Provisional Government speaks of

… the desire of the whole nation [!] to fight the world war out to a decisive victory. […] Needless to say, [the Note adds], the Provisional Government […] will fully stand by its obligations towards our Allies.

Short and clear. War to a decisive victory. The alliance with the British and French bankers is sacred…

Who concluded this alliance with ‘our’ Allies, i.e. with the British and French multi-millionaires? The tsar, Rasputin, the tsar’s gang, of course. But to Milyukov and co. this treaty is sacred.

Why?

Some say: because Milyukov is insincere, he is a crafty person and so on.

But that is not the point. The point is that Guchkov, Milyukov, Tereshchenko and Konovalov are spokesmen of the capitalists. And the seizure of foreign lands is necessary to the capitalists. They will receive new markets, new places to export capital to, new opportunities to arrange profitable jobs for tens of thousands of their sons, etc. The point is that at the present moment the interests of the Russian capitalists are identical with those of the British and French capitalists. That, and that alone, is the reason why the tsar’s treaties with the British and French capitalists are precious to the Provisional Government of the Russian capitalists.

The new Note of the Provisional Government will pour oil on the flames. It can only arouse a bellicose spirit in Germany. It will help Wilhelm the Brigand to go on deceiving ‘his own’ workers and soldiers and drag them into a war ‘to a finish’.

The new Note of the Provisional Government puts the issue squarely: what next?

From the very first moment of our revolution, the British and French capitalists have been assuring us that the Russian revolution was made solely and exclusively in order to fight the war out ‘to a finish’. The capitalists want to plunder Turkey, Persia and China. If this should entail the slaughter of another 10 million or so Russian muzhiks^[31] – what of it? What we need is a ‘decisive victory’… And now the Provisional Government, with utter frankness, has adopted the same course.

‘Fight – because we want to plunder. Die in your tens of thousands every day – because “we” have not yet fought it out and have not yet got our share of the spoils!’

No class-conscious worker, no class-conscious soldier will support the policy of ‘confidence’ in the Provisional Government any longer. The policy of confidence is bankrupt.

Our Social-Democratic City Conference stated in its resolution that the correctness of our view would be corroborated now every day.^[32] But not even we had expected events to move so fast.

The present Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies is faced with the alternative: either to swallow the pill offered by Guchkov and Milyukov, which would mean renouncing an independent political role once and for all, for tomorrow Milyukov would put his ‘feet on the table’ and reduce the Soviet to a mere cipher; or to reject Milyukov’s Note, which would mean breaking with the old policy of confidence and adopting the course proposed by Pravda.

Naturally, a middle-of-the-road course might be found. But would it be for long?

Workers and soldiers, you must now loudly declare that there must be only one power in the country – the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The Provisional Government, the government of a handful of capitalists, must make way for these Soviets.

Icons versus Cannons, Phrases versus Capital

Published 21 April (4 May) 1917

The Note of the Provisional Government on war to a victorious finish has aroused indignation even among those who nourished illusory hopes for a possible renunciation of annexations on the part of the government of capitalists. The newspapers that have been acting as mouthpieces of this petty-bourgeois policy of illusory hopes are today either mumbling in dismay, like Rabochaya Gazeta,^[33] or are trying to turn this indignation against individuals. Novaya Zhizn^[34] writes:

There is no place in the government of democratic Russia for a champion of the interests of international capital! We are sure the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies will act promptly in taking the most energetic measures towards rendering Mr. Milyukov harmless.

And Dyelo Naroda^[35] expresses the same piece of philistine wisdom in the following words. Milyukov’s Note, it says, “tries to reduce to nought a statement of the greatest international importance approved by the entire cabinet.”

Icons versus cannons. Phrases versus capital. The government’s statement renouncing annexations was a piece of utterly worthless diplomatic verbiage, which might deceive an ignorant muzhik, but could not ‘confuse’ the leaders of the petty-bourgeois Social-Democratic and Socialist-Revolutionary parties, the writers of Novaya Zhizn and Dyelo Naroda, unless they were willing to be deceived. What empty phrases are these about there being “no place in the government of democratic Russia for a champion of the interests of international capital!” Educated people ought to be ashamed of themselves, writing such nonsense.

The whole Provisional Government is a government of the capitalist class. It is a matter of class, not of persons. To attack Milyukov personally, to demand, directly or indirectly, his dismissal, is a silly comedy, for no change of personalities can change anything so long as the classes in power are unchanged.

To draw a line between the ‘democracy’ of Russia, Britain, France, etc., and the championing of capital is to sink to the level, of the economic and political wisdom of a Gapon.^[36]

It is pardonable for ignorant muzhiks to demand of the capitalist a ‘promise’ that he ‘live righteously’ and not capitalistically, that he should not ‘champion the interests of capital’. But for the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, for the writers of Novaya Zhizn and Dyelo Naroda to adopt such methods means to nourish the illusory hopes which the people place in the capitalists, hopes that are most harmful and ruinous to the cause of freedom, to the cause of the revolution.

Resolution of the CC of the RSDLP(B)

Adopted 21 April (4 May) 1917

Having considered the situation which has arisen in Petrograd after the imperialist, annexationist and predatory Note of the Provisional Government of 18 April (1 May) 1917, and after a number of meetings and demonstrations of the people held in the streets of Petrograd on 20 April (3 May), the Central Committee of the RSDLP resolves:

1. Party propagandists and speakers must refute the despicable lies of the capitalist papers and of the papers supporting the capitalists to the effect that we are holding out the threat of civil war. This is a despicable lie, for only at the present moment, as long as the capitalists and their government cannot and dare not use force against the masses, as long as the mass of soldiers and workers are freely expressing their will and freely electing and displacing all authorities – at such a moment any thought of civil war would be naive, senseless, preposterous; at such a moment there must be compliance with the will of the majority of the population and free criticism of this will by the discontented minority; should violence be resorted to, the responsibility will fall on the Provisional Government and its supporters.
2. By their outcries against civil war, the government of the capitalists and its newspapers are only trying to conceal the reluctance of the capitalists, who admittedly constitute an insignificant minority of the people, to submit to the will of the majority.
3. In order to learn the will of the majority of the population in Petrograd, where there is now an unusually large number of soldiers who are familiar with the sentiment of the peasants and correctly express it, a popular vote must at once be arranged in all the districts of Petrograd and its suburbs to ascertain what the attitude is towards the government’s Note, what support the various parties enjoy, and what kind of Provisional Government is desired.
4. All Party propagandists must advocate these views and this proposal at factories, in regiments, in the streets, etc., by means of peaceful discussion and peaceful demonstrations, as well as meetings everywhere; we must endeavour to organise regular voting in factories and regiments, taking care that order and comradely discipline are strictly observed.
5. Party propagandists must again and again protest against the despicable slander spread by the capitalists alleging that our Party stands for a separate peace with Germany. We consider Wilhelm II as bad a crowned brigand meriting execution as Nicholas II, and the German Guchkovs, i.e. the German capitalists, just as much annexationists, robbers and imperialists as the Russian, British and all other capitalists. We are against negotiating with the capitalists, we are for negotiating and fraternising with the revolutionary workers and soldiers of all countries. We are convinced that the reason why the Guchkov-Milyukov government is trying to aggravate the situation is because it knows that the workers’ revolution in Germany is beginning, and that this revolution will be a blow to the capitalists of all countries.
6. When the Provisional Government spreads rumours about utter and unavoidable economic chaos, it is not only trying to frighten the people into leaving the power in the hands of this Provisional Government, but is also vaguely, fumblingly expressing the profound and indubitable truth that all the nations of the world have been led into a blind alley, that the war waged in the interests of the capitalists has driven them to the brink of an abyss, and that there is really no way out except through the transfer of power to the revolutionary class, i.e. to the revolutionary proletariat, which is capable of adopting revolutionary measures.

   If there are any stocks of grain, etc., in the country, the new government of the workers and soldiers will know how to dispose of them too. But if the capitalist war has brought economic ruin to a stage where there is no bread at all, the capitalist government will only aggravate the condition of the people instead of improving it.

7. We consider the policy of the present majority of leaders of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, of the Narodnik and Menshevik parties, to be profoundly erroneous, since confidence in the Provisional Government, attempts to compromise with it, dickering over amendments, etc., would in fact mean only so many more useless scraps of paper and useless delays; and besides, this policy threatens to create a divergence between the will of the Soviet on the one hand, and that of the majority of revolutionary soldiers at the front and in Petrograd, and of the majority of workers, on the other.
8. We call upon those workers and soldiers who believe that the Soviet must change its policy and renounce the policy of confidence in and compromise with the capitalist government, to hold new elections of delegates to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and to send to that body only people who would steadfastly hold to a quite definite opinion consonant with the actual will of the majority.

   Honest Defencism Reveals Itself

Published 22 April (5 May) 1917

Events in Petrograd during the last few days, especially yesterday, illustrate how right we were in speaking of the ‘honest’ defencism of the mass as distinguished from the defencism of the leaders and parties.

The mass of the population is made up of proletarians, semi-proletarians, and poor peasants. They are the vast majority of the nation. These classes are not at all interested in annexations. Imperialist policies, the profits of banking capital, incomes from railways in Persia, lucrative jobs in Galicia and Armenia, putting restraints on the freedom of Finland – all these are things in which these classes are not interested.

But all these things taken together just go to make up what is known in science and the press as imperialist, annexationist, predatory policy.

The crux of the matter is that the Guchkovs, Milyukovs and Lvovs – be they even all paragons of virtue, disinterestedness and love of their fellow-man – are the spokesmen, leaders and chosen representatives of the capitalist class, a class which has a vested interest in a predatory, annexationist policy. This class invested billions ‘in the war’, and is making hundreds of millions ‘out of the war’ and annexations (i.e. out of the subjugation or forced incorporation of alien nationalities).

To believe that the capitalist class will ‘mend its ways’, will cease to be a capitalist class, will give up its profits, is a fatuous hope, an idle dream, and in effect a deception of the people. Only petty-bourgeois politicians, fluctuating between capitalist and proletarian policies, can entertain or encourage such fatuous hopes. Herein lies the mistake of the present leaders of the Narodnik parties and the Mensheviks, Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Chernov and the others.

The mass representatives of defencism are not at all versed in politics. They have not been able to learn politics from books, from participation in the Duma, or from close observation of people engaged in politics.

The mass representatives of defencism still do not know that wars are waged by governments, that governments represent the interests of certain classes, that the present war, on the part of both belligerent groups, is waged by the capitalists in the predatory interests of and for the predatory aims of the capitalists.

Unaware as they are of this, the mass representatives of defencism argue quite simply: we do not want annexations, we demand a democratic peace, we do not want to fight for Constantinople, for putting down Persia, for plundering Turkey and so on; we ‘demand’ that the Provisional Government give up its policy of annexations.

The mass representatives of defencism are sincere in wishing this, not in a personal but in a class sense, because they speak for classes that are not interested in annexations. But what these representatives of the masses do not know is that the capitalists and their government may throw over the policy of annexations in words, may dangle promises and mouth fine phrases, but cannot really abandon the idea of annexations.

That is why the mass representatives of defencism were so strongly and legitimately shocked by the Provisional Government’s Note of 18 April (1 May).

People familiar with politics could not have been surprised by this Note, for they knew only too well that when the capitalists ‘renounce annexations’ they do not really mean it. It is just the usual trick and phrase-mongering of diplomats.

But the ‘honest’ mass representatives of defencism were surprised, shocked, indignant. They felt – they did not understand it quite clearly, but they felt that they had been tricked.

This is the essence of the crisis and it should be clearly distinguished from the opinions, expectations and suppositions of single individuals and parties.

To patch up this crisis for a while with a new declaration, with a new Note (that is what Mr. Plekhanov’s advice in Yedinstvo and the aspirations of Milyukov and co., on the one hand, and those of Chkheidze and Tsereteli, on the other, amount to) – to paper over the cracks with a new promise is of course possible, but this can do nothing but harm. A new promise would inevitably mean a new deception of the masses; therefore a new outburst of indignation, and such an outburst, if lacking intelligent orientation, might easily become very harmful.

The masses should be told the whole truth. The government of the capitalists cannot abandon annexations; it is caught in its own meshes and there is no escape. It feels, it realises, it sees that without revolutionary measures (of which only a revolutionary class is capable) there is no way out, and it is becoming panicky, losing its head; it promises one thing, but does another; at one minute it threatens the masses with violence (Guchkov and Shingarev), at the next it proposes that the power be taken out of its hands.

Economic ruin, crisis, the horrors of war, an impasse from which there is no way out – this is what the capitalists have brought all the nations to.

Indeed there is no way out – except through the transfer of power to the revolutionary class, to the revolutionary proletariat, which alone, supported by the majority of the population, is capable of aiding the revolution to victory in all the belligerent countries and leading humanity to lasting peace and liberation from the yoke of capitalism.

Resolution of the CC of the RSDLP(B)

Adopted in the Morning of 22 April (5 May) 1917

The political crisis that developed between 19 and 21 April (2-4 May) must be regarded, at least in its initial stage, as having passed.

The petty-bourgeois mass, angered by the capitalists, first swung away from them towards the workers; but two days later they again followed the Menshevik and Narodnik leaders, who stand for ‘confidence’ in and ‘compromise’ with the capitalists.

These leaders have compromised, completely surrendered all their positions, contenting themselves with the empty and purely verbal reservations of the capitalists.

The causes of the crisis have not been removed, and the recurrence of such crises is unavoidable.

The nature of the crisis is that the petty-bourgeois mass is vacillating between its age-old faith in the capitalists and its resentment against them, a tendency to place its faith in the revolutionary proletariat.

The capitalists are dragging out the war and covering up the fact by phrase-mongering. Only the revolutionary proletariat can put an end to, and is working towards putting an end to the war by means of a world revolution of the workers, a revolution which is obviously mounting in our country, ripening in Germany, and drawing closer in a number of other countries.

The slogan ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’ is an incorrect one at the present moment because, in the absence of a solid (i.e. a class-conscious and organised) majority of the people on the side of the revolutionary proletariat, such a slogan is either an empty phrase, or, objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character.

We shall favour the transfer of power to the proletarians and semi-proletarians only when the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies adopt our policy and are willing to take the power into their own hands.

The organisation of our Party, the consolidation of the proletarian forces, clearly proved inadequate at the time of the crisis.

The slogans of the moment are:

1. To explain the proletarian line and the proletarian way of ending the war;
2. To criticise the petty-bourgeois policy of placing trust in the government of the capitalists and compromising with it;
3. To carry on propaganda and agitation from group to group in every regiment, in every factory and, particularly, among the most backward masses, such as domestic servants, unskilled labourers, etc. since it was their backing in the first place that the bourgeoisie tried to gain during the crisis;
4. To organise, organise and once more organise the proletariat, in every factory, in every district and in every city quarter.

The resolution of the Petrograd Soviet of 21 April (4 May) banning all street meetings and demonstrations for two days must be unconditionally obeyed by every member of our Party. The Central Committee already distributed yesterday morning, and is today publishing in Pravda, a resolution which states that “at such a moment any thought of civil war would be senseless and preposterous”, that all demonstrations must be peaceful ones, and that the responsibility for violence will fall on the Provisional Government and its supporters.^[37] Our Party therefore considers that the above mentioned resolution of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies as a whole (and especially the part banning armed demonstrations and shooting in the air) is entirely correct and must be unconditionally obeyed.

We call upon all the workers and soldiers to consider carefully the results of the crisis of the last two days and to send as delegates to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and to the Executive Committee only such comrades as express the will of the majority, in all cases where a delegate does not express the opinion of the majority, new elections should be held in the factories and barracks.

Lessons of the Crisis

Written 22 April (5 May) 1917

Petrograd and the whole of Russia have passed through a serious political crisis, the first political crisis since the revolution.

On 18 April (1 May) the Provisional Government issued its unhappily notorious Note, which confirmed the predatory aims of the war clearly enough to arouse the indignation of the masses, who had honestly believed in the desire (and ability) of the capitalists to ‘renounce annexations’. On 20-21 April (3-4 May) Petrograd was in a turmoil. The streets were crowded; day and night knots and groups of people stood about, and meetings of various sizes sprang up everywhere; big street processions and demonstrations went on without a break. Yesterday evening, 21 April, the crisis, or, at any rate, the first stage of the crisis, apparently came to an end with the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and later the Soviet itself, declaring themselves satisfied with the ‘explanations’, the amendments to the Note and the ‘elucidations’ made by the government (which in fact boil down to empty phrases, saying absolutely nothing, changing nothing and committing the government to nothing). They considered the ‘incident settled’.

Whether the masses consider the ‘incident settled’, the future will show. Our task now is to make a careful study of the forces, the classes, that revealed themselves in the crisis, and to draw the relevant lessons for our proletarian party. For it is the great significance of all crises that they make manifest what has been hidden; they cast aside all that is relative, superficial and trivial; they sweep away the political litter and reveal the real mainsprings of the class struggle.

Strictly speaking, the capitalist government on 18 April (1 May) merely reiterated its previous notes, in which the imperialist war was invested with diplomatic equivocations. The soldiers were angry because they had honestly believed in the sincerity and peaceful intentions of the capitalists. The demonstrations began as soldiers’ demonstrations, under the contradictory, misguided and ineffectual slogan: ‘Down with Milyukov’ (as though a change of persons or groups could change the substance of policy!).

This means that the broad, unstable and vacillating mass, which is closest to the peasantry and which by its scientific class definition is petty-bourgeois, swung away from the capitalists towards the revolutionary workers. It was the swing or movement of this mass, strong enough to be a decisive factor, that caused the crisis.

It was at this point that other sections began to stir: not the middle but the extreme elements, not the intermediary petty bourgeoisie but the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, started to come out on to the streets and organise.

The bourgeoisie seized Nevsky Prospekt – or ‘Milyukov’ Prospekt as one paper called it – and the adjacent quarters of prosperous Petrograd, the Petrograd of the capitalists and the government officials. Officers, students and ‘the middle classes’ demonstrated in favour of the Provisional Government. Among the slogans, “Down with Lenin” frequently appeared on the banners.

The proletariat rallied in its own centres, the working-class suburbs, around the slogans and appeals of our Party’s Central Committee. On 20-21 April the Central Committee adopted resolutions, which were immediately passed on to the proletariat through the Party organisations. The workers poured through the poor, less central districts, and then in groups got through to Nevsky. By their mass character and solidarity, these demonstrations were very different from those of the bourgeoisie. Many banners carried the inscription “All Power to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”.

On Nevsky there were clashes. The ‘hostile’ demonstrations tore down each other’s banners. The Executive Committee received news by telephone from various places that there was shooting on both sides, that there were killed and wounded; but the information was extremely contradictory and unconfirmed.

The bourgeoisie shouted about the ‘spectre of civil war’, thus expressing its fear that the real masses, the actual majority of the nation, might seize power. The petty-bourgeois leaders of the Soviet, the Mensheviks and Narodniks – who since the revolution in general, and during the crisis in particular, have had no definite party policy – allowed themselves to be intimidated. In the Executive Committee almost half the votes were cast against the Provisional Government on the eve of the crisis, but now thirty-four votes (with nineteen against) are cast in favour of returning to a policy of confidence in and agreement with the capitalists.

And the ‘incident’ was considered ‘settled’.

What is the essence of the class struggle? The capitalists are for dragging out the war under cover of empty phrases and false promises. They are caught in the meshes of Russian, Anglo-French and American banking capital. The proletariat, as represented by its class-conscious vanguard, stands for the transfer of power to the revolutionary class, the working class and the semi-proletarians, for the development of a world workers’ revolution, a revolution which is clearly developing also in Germany, and for terminating the war by means of such a revolution.

The vast mass of people, chiefly the petty bourgeoisie, who still believe the Menshevik and Narodnik leaders and who have been absolutely intimidated by the bourgeoisie and are carrying out its policy, although with reservations, are swinging now to the right, now to the left.

The war is terrible; it has hit the vast mass of the people hardest of all; it is these people who are becoming aware, albeit still very vaguely, that the war is criminal, that it is being carried on through the rivalry and scramble of the capitalists, for the division of their spoils. The world situation is growing more and more involved. The only way out is a world workers’ revolution, a revolution which is now more advanced in Russia than in any other country, but which is clearly mounting (strikes, fraternisation) in Germany too. And the people are wavering: wavering between confidence in their old masters, the capitalists, and bitterness towards them; between confidence in the new class, the only consistently revolutionary class, which opens up the prospect of a bright future for all the working people – the proletariat – and a vague awareness of its role in world history.

This is not the first time the petty bourgeoisie and semi proletarians have wavered and it will not be the last!

The lesson is clear, comrade workers! There is no time to be lost. The first crisis will be followed by others. You must devote all your efforts to enlightening the backward, to making extensive, comradely and direct contact (not only by meetings) with every regiment and with every group of working people who have not had their eyes opened yet! All your efforts must be devoted to consolidating your own ranks, to organising the workers from the bottom upwards, including every district, every factory, every quarter of the capital and its suburbs! Do not be misled by those of the petty bourgeoisie who ‘compromise’ with the capitalists, by the defencists and by the ‘supporters’, nor by individuals who are inclined to be in a hurry and to shout ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’ before the majority of the people are solidly united. The crisis cannot be overcome by violence practised by individuals against individuals, by the local action of small groups of armed people, by Blanquist attempts to ‘seize power’, to ‘arrest’ the Provisional Government, etc.

Today’s task is to explain more precisely, more clearly, more widely the proletariat’s policy, its way of terminating the war. Rally more resolutely, more widely, wherever you can, to the ranks and columns of the proletariat! Rally round your Soviets; and within them endeavour to rally behind you a majority by comradely persuasion and by re-election of individual members!

Endnotes

[1] Tsereteli was a Menshevik who had a leading position in the Petrograd Soviet from February 1917.

[2] I.e. the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people. – Lenin

[3] I.e. a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype. – Lenin

[4] Instead of ‘Social-Democracy’, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the ‘defencists’ and the vacillating ‘Kautskyites’), we must call ourselves the Communist Party. – Lenin

[5] The ‘Centre’ in the international Social-Democratic movement is the trend which vacillates between the chauvinists (= ‘defencists’) and internationalists, i.e. Kautsky and co. in Germany; Longuet and co. in France; Chkheidze and co. in Russia; Turati and co. in Italy; MacDonald and co. in Britain; etc. – Lenin

[6] See Marx’s The Civil War in France, and Marx and Engels’ Critique of the Gotha Programme.

[7] I reprint these theses together with the brief comment from the same issue of Pravda as an appendix to this letter. – Lenin

[8] See Engels, Friedrich, ‘Letter to FA Sorge’, 29 November 1886, Marx and Engels Collected Works (henceforth referred to as MECW), Vol. 47, Lawrence and Wishart, 1975, pp. 531-2.

[9] Lenin, ‘The First Stage of the First Revolution – First Letter from Afar’.

[10] In a certain form and to a certain extent. – Lenin

[11] Lenin here quotes the words of Mephistopheles from Goethe’s tragedy, Faust.

[12] Lest my words be misinterpreted, I shall say at once that I am positively in favour of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers and Peasants immediately taking over all the land; but they should themselves observe the strictest order and discipline, not permit the slightest damage to machines, structures, or livestock, and in no case disorganise agriculture and grain production, but rather develop them, for the soldiers need twice as much bread, and the people must not be allowed to starve. – Lenin

[13] Louis-Auguste Blanqui was a French nineteenth century socialist who put forward that the revolution must be carried out, not by the masses, but as a coup de main of a small revolutionary minority.

[14] Lenin is referring to Marx’s The Civil War in France, written in 1871, and Engels’ introduction to the 1891 edition of the book.

[15] See Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses)’, 4 (17) April 1917.

[16] Plekhanov’s Anarchism and Socialism, first published in German in 1894.

[17] Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, July 1905, Collected Works (henceforth referred to as LCW), Vol. 9, Progress Publishers, 1960, pp. 84-85.

[18] See Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses)’, 4 (17) April 1917.

[19] Lenin uses the term ‘Narodnik’ to denote the three petty-bourgeois parties of the Narodnik trend, namely, the SRs and the two parties that had emerged from splits from the SRs: the Trudoviks and the Popular Socialists. For more, see the Narodnik glossary entry.

[20] A quotation from Ivan Krylov’s fable ‘The Cat and the Cook’.

[21] See Engels, Friedrich, ‘Letter to A Bebel’, 18-28 March 1875, MECW, Vol. 45, p. 64.

[22] Marx, Karl, The Civil War in France, Wellred Books, 2021, p. 48.

[23] From Manilov, a character in Gogol’s Dead Souls, represented as a type of easy-going sentimental landowner, whose name has become a synonym for an idle weak-willed dreamer.

[24] Reproduced in Lenin Selected Writings: On Imperialist War, p. 387.

[25] Reproduced in Lenin Selected Writings: On Imperialist War, p. 397. The Kienthal Conference was the second Zimmerwald Conference, held in April 1916.

[26] Pseudonym of Paul Levi.

[27] On 7 (20) April 1917, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, by a majority of twenty-one votes against fourteen, adopted a resolution in favour of supporting the so-called ‘Liberty Loan’ issued by the Provisional Government to finance the continuing imperialist war.

[28] See Engels, Friedrich, ‘Preface to Internationales aus dem “Volksstaat”’, MECW, Vol. 27, pp. 414-8.

[29] Marx, The German Ideology, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 510, quoting Heinrich Heine.

[30] Rech was the central organ of the Cadets, and Russkaya Volya was a daily founded and run by the big banks in Moscow.

[31] The Russian word for ‘peasants’.

[32] See LCW, Vol. 24, pp. 154-55.

[33] Central organ of the Mensheviks.

[34] Daily newspaper of a Menshevik trend, organ of a group of Social-Democrats known as Menshevik-Internationalists, adherents of Martov and non-aligned intellectuals.

[35] Daily paper of the SRs.

[36] Father Georgy Gapon was a Russian Orthodox priest and a popular working-class leader before the 1905 Revolution. On 9 (22) January 1905, he led a peaceful protest for democratic freedoms and better living conditions, to which the Imperial Army responded by firing upon the crowd. This event, later known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, served as the starting point of the 1905 Revolution.

[37] See ‘Resolution of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B) – Adopted 21 April (4 May) 1917’.