7. The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter fragment, titled "The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917," establishes its core argument by asserting that the revolutionary upheavals in Russia provide the most decisive practical lessons for the proletariat, specifically concerning the question of state power. The author immediately frames the subject as vast, but deliberately narrows the focus to the essential strategic conclusions that bear directly on the tasks facing the working class in any revolutionary situation. The central claim is that the concrete experience of 1905 and the two revolutions of 1917 (February and October) are not merely historical episodes but a living school for revolutionary strategy, offering irrefutable evidence about the nature of the bourgeois state and the necessity of its destruction.
The chapter draws on the theoretical context of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the state, particularly the Paris Commune, as the historical precedent for the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, the Russian experience is presented as the practical verification and extension of that theory. The key evidence implicitly referenced is the emergence of the soviets (workers' councils) in 1905 as a new form of mass organisation, and their re-emergence and seizure of power in 1917. The fragment’s argument is that these events proved the inadequacy of parliamentary republics and the need for a state form that is not a mere tool of the bourgeoisie. The polemical thrust is directed against reformist and centrist currents within the workers’ movement—specifically the Mensheviks and later the Social Revolutionaries—who argued that Russia was not "ripe" for socialist revolution and that the proletariat should support the liberal bourgeoisie in establishing a democratic republic. The text implicitly argues against the notion that the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution must be completed before the proletariat can fight for power. Instead, the experience of 1905 and 1917 demonstrated that the bourgeoisie is inherently counter-revolutionary and that the proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry, must take power directly, smashing the old state apparatus and replacing it with a soviet republic. The fragment thus serves as a condensed polemical weapon, using the concrete historical experience of the Russian revolutions to refute all theories of gradual, parliamentary transition to socialism and to hammer home the necessity of insurrection and the establishment of a workers' state.