Crisis of Leadership¶
Core Argument¶
Crisis of Leadership
This chapter dissects the internal convulsions within the Bolshevik Central Committee on the eve of the October insurrection, arguing that such crises are not aberrations but the necessary mechanism through which a revolutionary party adapts to a rapidly shifting reality. The core narrative thrust is Lenin’s isolated struggle against the vacillation of his closest comrades—Kamenev, Zinoviev, and, more guardedly, Stalin—who threatened to squander the revolutionary opportunity through parliamentary illusions and fatal delay.
The chapter’s key claim is that the reformist leaders of the Mensheviks and SRs, feeling power slipping away, convened the Democratic Conference as a smokescreen: a manoeuvre to divert the masses from the Soviets into harmless speechifying. The Bolshevik Central Committee’s decision to participate, and worse, to agree to enter the pre-parliament—a powerless appendage of the Provisional Government—is presented as a blunder of the first order. Trotsky led the fight to boycott, earning Lenin’s emphatic praise: “Bravo, Comrade Trotsky!” Lenin’s fury is documented through his own writings, where he demands that “class-conscious workers must take the matter into their own hands” and exert pressure on “those at the top,” warning that “vacillations may become ruinous.”
The evidence marshalled includes Lenin’s intervention at the Central Committee meeting of 10 (23) October, where he enumerated the reasons for immediate action: the international situation—mutinies in the German fleet, strikes of Czech workers, barricades in Italy—proved that “the growth of a world revolution is beyond dispute.” Domestically, the masses were “tired of words and resolutions”; delay risked Kerensky surrendering Red Petrograd to the Germans. Lenin’s insistence on the “technical aspect” of insurrection, his fear that “a lot of time has already been lost,” reveals his conviction that the party leadership was the weak link.
The chapter draws heavily on Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to provide theoretical context. It explicitly rejects the “unintelligent legend” of Bolshevism as an “emanation of the pure revolutionary idea,” insisting instead that the party developed within a “petty bourgeois environment” and “cultural backwardness,” adapting to each new situation “only by way of an inner crisis.” This is the chapter’s central polemic: against any idealised, mechanical conception of the Bolshevik Party that cannot account for its internal struggles. The vacillations of Kamenev and Zinoviev are not presented as treachery but as a sociological law—the leadership comes under extreme pressure from alien classes as insurrection approaches, and “all weaknesses stand cruelly exposed.” The chapter concludes that Lenin’s mistrust of the new CC members (Joffe and Uritsky) was mistaken—they stood firmly on the left—but his fear of his old comrades was tragically justified.