Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (Extract)¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (Extract)¶
In this urgent polemic, written on the eve of the October insurrection, Lenin hammers home the thesis that the Bolsheviks must seize power immediately or face the ruin of the revolution. The core argument is that the objective situation—peasant revolt, army disintegration, economic collapse, and the imminent surrender of Petrograd to the Germans by a treacherous Kerensky government—has made armed uprising the only viable course. Lenin attacks the Novaya Zhizn editorialists for their philistine stupidity in claiming that democracy is invincible on the defensive but loses when taking the offensive. Invoking Marx’s rules of insurrection, he insists that the revolutionary party must act with the greatest determination and always on the offensive, for the defensive is death. The lessons of the July Days, he argues, are not that the Bolsheviks overreached, but that they lacked majority support; since then, they have won majorities in the Soviets and among the peasantry, making insurrection both possible and necessary.
Lenin frames the political moment as a stark choice between a Kornilovite dictatorship and a dictatorship of the proletariat. He dismisses arguments for waiting—whether for the Constituent Assembly, for the Bolsheviks to grow stronger, or for the vacillating Left Socialist-Revolutionaries—as fatal illusions. The Constituent Assembly cannot solve famine or war; only a workers’ and peasants’ government can. The international situation, far from counselling delay, demands that the Bolsheviks support the German revolutionaries by rising up. Lenin accuses Zinoviev and Kamenev of strikebreaking for publishing their opposition to the Central Committee’s decision in the non-Party press, thereby revealing the Party’s secret plan to the enemy. He demands their expulsion, declaring war to the finish against such blacklegs.
The chapter’s historical context is the immediate prelude to the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks had won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets but faced intense pressure from the Provisional Government, the Kornilovite generals, and the Allied imperialists. Lenin’s polemic is notable for its ruthless insistence on insurrection as an art, not a conspiracy, requiring a party of a definite class, analysis of the political moment, and the sympathy of the majority proven by objective facts. He concludes that the question is not of voting but of insurrection, to be decided and effected in Petrograd and its vicinity as quickly and energetically as possible. The subsequent proclamation announces the Provisional Government deposed and power transferred to the Revolutionary Military Committee, declaring the workers’ and peasants’ revolution accomplished.