Chapter 5 - 1917: From the April Theses to the October, Proletarian Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
Between February and October 1917, Lenin fundamentally transformed Bolshevik strategy, abandoning the stagist Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry (RDDPP) in favour of the Theory of Permanent Revolution. This shift, publicly crystallised in the April Theses, declared the existing dual power obsolete and called for a republic of Soviets with power transferred to the proletariat and poorest peasants. The theses were initially rejected by the Bolshevik leadership—Kamenev insisted the bourgeois-democratic revolution remained incomplete—but Lenin’s methodological emphasis on concrete events allowed him to discard outdated schemas. The party’s rank-and-file workers, radicalised by revolutionary events, ensured branch after branch backed Lenin, crushing the Old Bolshevik nucleus as Petrograd party membership grew from 2,000 in February to 16,000 by April.
Lenin’s Letters from Afar reveal his ideas in flux. He initially demanded destruction of the old state machine and power to Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, remaining within a stagist framework. By his unfinished Fifth Letter, however, he had moved to calling for a proletarian state and immediate steps towards control of production and distribution—qualitatively changing the revolution’s goal. The April Theses declared the RDDPP slogan “dead”; those who clung to it had gone over to the petty bourgeoisie. Lenin argued that while objective conditions for socialism did not exist in Russia alone, they existed on a world scale; the Russian Revolution was part of a world revolution. Practical steps—nationalisation of land, state control over banks, progressive income tax—would place Russia “with one foot in socialism.”
From April to July, Lenin campaigned for peaceful transfer of power to the Soviets under the slogans “All Power to the Soviets” and “Down with the Capitalist Ministers.” After the July Days and Kerensky’s repression, he called for armed uprising. By August, Lenin had adopted a permanentist position more radical than Trotsky’s 1906 formulation: the bourgeois-democratic demand for land could only be realised after the proletariat seized state power. After Kornilov’s failed coup, Bolsheviks gained control of the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin insisted the party alone should lead the insurrection, but Trotsky linked it to the Second Soviet Congress, winning broader support. The October Revolution was carried out under Trotsky’s strategy.
Lenin consistently referred to the October Revolution as socialist and the resulting state as the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by poor peasants. The Bolsheviks issued the Decree on Land before Left SRs joined the government, winning peasant support. Lenin argued the revolution did not skip the bourgeois-democratic stage; rather, proletarian dictatorship was the necessary prerequisite for carrying that stage through to its end. The Bolsheviks’ victory resulted from overwhelming superiority at decisive points: the majority of the class-conscious proletariat, the two metropolitan cities, and the armed forces nearest the capitals.