The Bolsheviks in February¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter examines the condition of the Bolshevik Party at the outbreak of the February Revolution, arguing that the organisation was numerically weak, politically disoriented, and initially incapable of leading the uprising. Drawing on membership figures from Istoriya KPSS, it shows that in February 1917 the party had only around 2,000 members in Petrograd, 600 in Moscow, and similarly modest numbers across other industrial centres — a tiny fraction of a population of roughly 150 million. The chapter insists, however, that raw numbers understate the Bolsheviks’ influence. Their cadres were predominantly working-class, disciplined, and experienced, often functioning as natural leaders in the factories, enjoying the trust of fellow workers and carrying the political capital accumulated during the 1912–14 upsurge. The Menshevik and Social Revolutionary organisations were in far worse shape, and even the left Menshevik Sukhanov acknowledged the Bolsheviks as the main workers’ tendency in Petrograd.
Yet the chapter is equally emphatic about the party’s failings. The Petrograd leadership — Shlyapnikov, Zalutsky, and Molotov — is portrayed as politically flat-footed. Sukhanov’s damning assessment of Shlyapnikov is quoted at length: a capable conspirator and trade union organiser, but no politician, unable to grasp the concrete essence of the moment. The chapter argues that this pattern repeated the experience of 1905, when Bolshevik committee men lost their bearings in a new situation and lagged behind the movement until Lenin rearmed the party with a revolutionary perspective. Soviet histories, it contends, have long concealed this. The claim that the party issued a leaflet on 26 February is refuted; more recent investigations show the first leaflet appeared on 27 February, by which time Petrograd was already in the grip of a general strike and army mutinies. The Bolshevik leadership was following, not leading.
Evidence of initial hesitancy is drawn from Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin and the memoirs of V.N. Kayurov, a member of the Vyborg District Committee. Kayurov recounts urging women workers on 22 February to refrain from demonstrations and act only on party instructions — only to learn with “astonishment” and “indignation” that they had struck anyway. The chapter uses this to illustrate the gap between the party’s caution and the masses’ militancy. Once the scale of the movement became clear, the Bolsheviks recovered, issuing revolutionary slogans, raiding arsenals, and fraternising with troops. By 27 February, the Vyborg Committee was organising for armed insurrection. But the initial disorientation is presented as decisive.
The chapter then turns to a polemic against bourgeois historiography, which contrasts a “spontaneous” February Revolution with a conspiratorial October coup. Both characterisations are rejected. October was the organised expression of a majority will; February was not merely spontaneous. The term “spontaneous” is attacked as a cover for contempt for the masses. Every strike has a leadership, the chapter insists, and in Russia that leadership came from the most conscious workers — overwhelmingly Bolsheviks at the factory level. Individual Bolshevik workers, without waiting for orders from the Petrograd leadership, provided direction, drawing on basic party slogans about war, land, the republic, and the eight-hour day. Their limited stock of ideas, combined with class instinct, made them “giants in their workplaces”.
Nonetheless, these local leaders could carry the revolution only so far. The party leadership, still clinging to the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, had no perspective of working-class power. The overthrow of tsarism left them confused. The chapter notes that the lines between Bolshevik and Menshevik workers blurred in the revolutionary upsurge; in many provinces, the two factions fused spontaneously, and remained united until October. This is presented as evidence of the tenacity of unity within the working class and the complexity of building a revolutionary party. The Bolsheviks did not drop from the sky; they were formed through a protracted struggle within the existing Social Democratic organisations, a process that only concluded with the seizure of power in October 1917.