The First Stage of the First Revolution (First ‘Letter from Afar’)¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: The First Stage of the First Revolution (First ‘Letter from Afar’)¶
In this first of his ‘Letters from Afar’, written in the immediate aftermath of the February-March Revolution of 1917, Lenin provides a Marxist dissection of the collapse of the tsarist monarchy and the class forces now contending for power in Russia. He argues that the revolution, which overthrew the Romanov dynasty in a mere eight days, was the product of two dissimilar currents merging: the conspiracy of Anglo-French imperialists and Russian bourgeois-landlord elements (the Octobrists and Cadets) seeking to depose Nicholas II in order to prosecute the imperialist war more ferociously, and the spontaneous mass revolutionary movement of workers and soldiers demanding bread, peace, and freedom. The soil for this upheaval had been deeply ploughed by the 1905 revolution, which revealed the true alignment of classes, while the subsequent counter-revolution of 1907–14 laid bare the monarchy’s essence. The imperialist world war, waged for plunder and colonial redivision, acted as the ‘stage manager’ that accelerated history.
Lenin identifies three political forces: the defunct tsarist monarchy; the bourgeois Provisional Government, controlled by Octobrists and Cadets and acting as an agent of Anglo-French capital; and the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the embryo of a workers’ government representing the poor majority. The new government, monarchist at heart, cannot deliver peace, bread, or freedom, as it respects the sanctity of capital and landownership and is striking a bargain with the Romanov dynasty. The revolution is therefore transitioning from its first stage to a second. The proletariat must not support the Provisional Government but instead arm itself, strengthen the Soviets, and organise a universal people’s militia—merging police, military, and state functions with control over social production and distribution. This militia, drawn from the entire able-bodied population and led by the proletariat, would replace the standing army and police, acting as the executive organ of the Soviets. Lenin insists such measures constitute not socialism but the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry’.
The proletariat has two allies: the broad mass of semi-proletarian and small-peasant population, which the cruel lessons of war will push towards it, and the proletariat of all belligerent countries. In Germany, the future of socialism belongs not to the traitors Scheidemann, Legien, and David, nor to the vacillating Haase and Kautsky, but to the trend represented by Karl Liebknecht and the Spartacus group. Lenin’s November 1914 slogan—‘Turn the imperialist war into a civil war’—once denounced as ‘insane’ by Plekhanov and David, is now becoming a fact. The Russian proletariat, though less organised than its European counterparts, has the historical honour of beginning the series of revolutions made inevitable by the imperialist war. Socialism cannot triumph directly in backward, peasant Russia, but the revolution can become the prologue to world socialist revolution. The immediate task is organisation: drawing the oppressed masses into an organisation that takes over the military, political, and economic functions of the state.