Lenin and Trotsky in 1917¶
Core Argument¶
In the crucible of 1917, the chapter demonstrates a profound convergence between Lenin and Trotsky, forged independently and in isolation, against the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Party. From exile in Switzerland, Lenin immediately grasped that the February Revolution had produced a regime of dual power, a contradiction between the bourgeois Provisional Government and the nascent workers’ government of the Soviets. His Letters from Afar demanded a complete break: no support for the new government, no rapprochement with other parties, and the arming of the proletariat as the sole guarantee of the revolution’s future. This position was not merely radical; it was a direct repudiation of the line being pursued in Petrograd by Kamenev, Stalin, and the other ‘Old Bolsheviks’, who believed the bourgeois-democratic revolution was incomplete and therefore required support for the Provisional Government.
The chapter draws on the theoretical history of the Russian Social Democracy to explain this conflict. Lenin’s pre-1917 theory of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ had contained a fatal ambiguity, which in practice led the Bolshevik leaders toward conciliation with the Mensheviks and liberals. Trotsky, by contrast, had argued since 1905 that the Russian bourgeoisie was incapable of leading a democratic revolution, and that the working class would have to take power itself or the revolution would fail. The chapter shows that when Trotsky, writing from New York, produced his own analysis of the February Revolution, it was identical to Lenin’s in every particular: the Provisional Government must be opposed, the Soviets must become organs of struggle for power, and only a revolutionary workers’ government could carry out the democratic tasks. The text reproduces Trotsky’s articles from Novy Mir to demonstrate this convergence, noting that Lenin was initially misled by false reports from Alexandra Kollontai into attacking Trotsky as a ‘centrist’.
The polemical thrust is directed against the Stalinist historiography that later sought to present ‘Trotskyism’ as a deviation from Leninism. The chapter uses the evidence of the suppressed and mutilated Letters from Afar to show that it was the ‘Old Bolsheviks’—Kamenev, Stalin, Zinoviev—who were out of step with Lenin, not Trotsky. Zinoviev’s own 1923 History of the Bolshevik Party is quoted to show his evasive admission that the party leadership clung to the idea that Russia could not pass directly to socialist revolution. The chapter concludes that the complete identity of views between Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 was no accident, but the vindication of Trotsky’s long-standing theoretical position against the conciliationist errors of the Bolshevik centre.