The Turn of the Tide¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter traces the resurgence of the Russian revolutionary movement between mid-1915 and late 1916, arguing that the imperialist war, far from crushing the proletariat, provided the objective conditions for its political reawakening. The core narrative thrust is that Lenin’s isolated “defeatist” position—that Russia’s military reverses would destabilise tsarism and reignite class struggle—was vindicated by events. The chapter opens with Trotsky’s aphorism that theory is “the superiority of foresight over astonishment,” and proceeds to demonstrate how the war’s material realities forced the masses to rediscover revolutionary consciousness.
Key claims are supported by statistical and anecdotal evidence. The strike wave is meticulously quantified: 1,063 strikes in 1915, a fifteen-fold increase on the latter half of 1914, with 569,999 strikers. The textile workers of Ivanovo-Voznesensk and Kostroma are identified as the vanguard, their August 1915 demonstration met with troops who killed 100 and wounded 40. Yet the regime’s violence proved futile; strikes spread to Petersburg, Tver, Tula, Kharkov, and beyond. The chapter argues that this militancy was not spontaneous but the product of a revolutionary layer trained in the 1912–14 struggles, whose consciousness survived wartime repression. Lenin’s “Three Whales” slogans—democratic republic, confiscation of estates, eight-hour day—re-emerged on workers’ lips.
The chapter draws heavily on the theoretical legacy of the 1905 revolution and the subsequent period of reaction. It situates the Bolsheviks’ tactical manoeuvres within the framework of Lenin’s writings from 1915, particularly his insistence that soviets must be “organs of insurrection, of revolutionary rule,” not conciliationist talking-shops. The historical context of the War Industry Committees (VPK) is explained: the bourgeoisie’s May 1915 initiative to control war profits and burnish its patriotic credentials, and the Mensheviks’ and SRs’ fatal error of treating these bodies as vehicles for workers’ control.
The polemical thrust is directed squarely at the “defencists”—the right-wing Mensheviks and SRs who collaborated with the war effort. Their “Labour Congress” fantasy and participation in the VPK are condemned as a betrayal of internationalism, a subordination of working-class interests to the liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin’s tactical distinction is emphasised: the Bolsheviks participated in the first round of VPK elections solely for agitation and organisation, then boycotted the second round under police terror. The chapter contrasts the Bolsheviks’ illegal, persecuted existence with the defencists’ legal journals, liberal funding, and comfortable premises on Liteiny Prospekt—privileges that did not ultimately protect them from tsarist crackdowns. The “puerile, contemptible and harmful” notion of forgetting differences for the sake of unity is denounced, with Lenin quoted at length: only an open struggle for leadership of the working class, not the mixing of programmes, could advance the revolution.