Lenin's Revolution - Humanities-Ebooks

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History Insights
General Editor: Martyn Housden
Lenin’s
Revolution
Stuart Andrews
‘History will not
forgive us if we do
not seize power’
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© Stuart Andrews, 2007
The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
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ISBN 978-1-84760-054-7

Lenin’s Revolution
Stuart Andrews
History Insights ☼ Humanities-Ebooks

Contents
About the author
Preface
BACKGROUND
1.1 The Communist Manifesto
1.2 Student revolutionaries
1.3 Lenin’s early Marxism
Chapter 2 The Making of a Bolshevik
2.1 Prison and exile
2.2 Revolution by journalism
2.3 Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
2.4 Russian Robespierre?
Chapter 3 Dress Rehearsal 1904–1907
3.1 ‘Bloody Sunday’
3.2 Organising for revolution
3.3 Potemkin Mutiny
3.4 Fourth Congress (1906)
3.5 Lenin and the Duma
LENIN’S 1917
Chapter 4 Visions in Exile: 1908−1916
4.1 Bolshevik disagreements
4.2 Defining the Party line
4.3 Malinovsky—secret agent
4.4 International perspectives
4.5 Opposing patriotism
4.6 Redefining capitalism

Lenin’s Revolution 5
Chapter 5 1917: February Revolution
5.1 Absentee revolutionary
5.2 Duma and Soviet
5.3 Leaving Switzerland
5.4 Letters from Afar
5.5 The Finland Station
Chapter 6 1917: Towards October
6.1 ‘April Theses’
6.2 ‘All power to the Soviets’
6.3 July Days
6.4 Kornilov
6.5 ‘History will not forgive us’
6.6 Relying on Trotsky
Chapter 7 Shaping the Revolution
7.1 Armed vanguard
7.2 Towards Brest-Litovsk
7.3 Constituent Assembly
7.4 Saving the Revolution
ASSESSMENT
Chapter 8 Leninist legacy
8.1 Tradition of Terror
8.2 Red Army
8.3 New Economic Policy: reversing priorities
8.4 Revival of bureaucracy
8.5 One-party government
8.6 Communism: home and abroad.
8.7 Government by propaganda
ADDENDA
Lenin’s Revolutionaries: a checklist
Guidance on further study: critical bibliography

About the author
Stuart Andrews is now Librarian of Wells & Mendip Museum, UK, after
more than 30 years of teaching. His special interest is the way in which
slogans, ‘spin’ and full-blooded propaganda—rather than historical reality—shape
public perceptions of events. Among his recent publications
on this theme are The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution,
1789–99 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2000) and Irish Rebellion: Protestant polemic
1798–1900 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006). He now focuses on the role
of slogan-making in the Bolshevik Revolution. Political theorists (he concedes)
may not themselves orchestrate revolution, but they can provide a
ready-made vocabulary with which to justify it.

Preface
What has become of Lenin’s Russia? What is his relevance in a world where ‘Leningrad’
has reverted to ‘St Petersburg’; where President Yeltsin re-builds Moscow’s Cathedral
of Christ the Saviour; and where President Putin attends the Christmas Eucharist of
the Orthodox Church, and commends a religion which ‘unites everyone on the basis
of traditional moral values and strengthens the moral principles of society’? Much
has changed, but Lenin remains important because the Russian Revolution, no less
than the French Revolution, has shaped the modern world. My twenty-first century
account attempts to view Lenin from a post-1989 perspective. It is written for a
Europe without the Berlin Wall, and without the USSR. It adopts a largely narrative
approach because in revolutions one thing leads to another—and often in unexpected
ways. Lenin himself, as Robert Service remarks, was ‘unexpected’. James Maxton,
an earlier biographer of Lenin, spelt out this unexpectedness: ‘He was a plain man
who had appeared out of obscurity to meet a need felt keenly by 150 millions of
people in the armies of Russia, in the factories and streets of Moscow and Petrograd
and in the thousands of villages scattered over the vast plains of Russia.’ Modern
scholars focus on those 150 millions—‘the revolution from below’—reflected in the
title of Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy (1996). But this study returns the focus to
the revolution’s leader.
Lenin did not conjure up the grievances of workers, soldiers and peasants that
made the Bolshevik’s bloodless October coup possible, but he did express the grievances,
and prescribe remedies, in slogans that made sense to the masses—or at least
to the local activists who motivated them. Besides emphasizing the extraordinary
phenomenon of Lenin’s practical political achievements, my study focuses on the
persuasive gloss which his writings place on every unexpected turn of events. So there
are frequent references to the Collected Works and to the 1917 writings extracted by
Slavoj Zizek in Revolution at the Gates (2002).
For the narrative I have drawn widely on pre-1989 historians, but of course the
text makes extensive use of recent scholarship, particularly the two following historiographical
studies: Critical Compendium to the Russian Revolution edited by Edward

Lenin’s Revolution 8
Acton (1997) and Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia edited by Ian Thatcher (2006).
Other printed sources are indicated parenthetically in the text—with full bibliographical
details provided in ‘Guidance on further study’.
Dates are given as in the modern calendar, though ‘February Revolution’ and
‘October Revolution’ are retained. Transliteration of Russian names follows the style
of Acton’s Critical Compendium except for using ‘y’ rather than ‘ii’ for final endings
of surnames. Full names of the various brands of revolutionary socialists featured in
Lenin’s Revolution are listed separately.

Chapter 1 Fifty Years of Marxism
1.1 The Communist Manifesto
Not the least of the paradoxes implicit in Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution is its apparently
un-Marxist character. Karl Marx’s revolutionary model had been formulated
by analogy with the dialectical method of classical Greek and medieval philosophy
for conducting oral debate. The dialectical form of disputation proceeded from major
premise (thesis) through minor premise (antithesis) to conclusion (synthesis). Marx
followed Hegel in applying the dialectical form to the actual unfolding of history
(Wilson, pp. 179−198). For Marx, the bourgeoisie (thesis) opposed by the proletariat
(antithesis) leads to the classless society (synthesis). The first section of the
Communist Manifesto, headed ‘Bourgeois and Proletarian’, begins: ‘The history of
all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Communist Manifesto,
p. 79).
The assumptions of the Manifesto reflect its origins. Written by Marx in 1847 and
published in German in London in February 1848, it was backed by evidence drawn
by Friedrich Engels from the commissions of inquiry into conditions of employment
in towns and factories of contemporary England⎯the most highly industrialized
country of its day. Ever since the enfranchisement of the middle classes by the 1832
Reform Act it had been easy to trace the fault lines in British society, as reflected in a
House of Commons increasingly representative of the commercial and manufacturing
interests, and an Upper House of large landowners. In 1848 it was hardly accurate
to claim that in Britain ‘the executive of the modern State is but a committee of the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ The English landed interest did not surrender
power so easily. But the rapid industrialization of Britain did seem to confirm
the Marxist gibe that ‘the need of a constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole face of the globe.’ And it was certainly true of
England that ‘with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in
number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses’ (Manifesto, pp. 82–3, 89).
The ‘immediate plan of the Communists’ is defined as ‘formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by

Lenin’s Revolution 10
the proletariat’(Manifesto, p. 95). This assumes that the revolution will be an urban
revolution of industrial workers. Yet Lenin’s revolution took place in a country where
most of the population were peasants. Marx’s so-called ‘Dialectical Materialism’
implies a connection between the dialectical model of historical development and
its purely economic motivation, And when considering how far Lenin’s revolution
conforms to the Marxist pattern, we must measure the Bolshevik achievement against
the Manifesto’s practical programme—which Marx thinks will be ‘pretty generally
applicable’. It includes: abolition of private landed property and all rights of inheritance;
a graduated income tax; nationalization of banks, communications and transport;
increased numbers of state-owned factories; cultivation of waste lands; equal
liability of all to labour, and the establishment of ‘industrial armies’; combination of
agriculture and manufacturing industry leading to the ‘gradual abolition of town and
country’; free education for children in state schools and abolition of child labour in
factories (Manifesto, pp. 104−5).
The spread of Marxist ideas in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth
century can be charted in prefaces to successive editions of the Manifesto. In 1872
its authors could claim that the Manifesto had been republished in Germany at least
12 times since 1848. Now, writing after the Paris Commune, ‘where the proletariat
for the first time held political power for two whole months’, Marx and Engels drew
the lesson that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State
machinery’. In 1872 a Russian edition of Marx’s Capital appeared⎯the first non-
German edition to be published. The Manifesto, translated by Bakunin, had appeared
in Russia in the 1860, but it was then (as the preface to the 1882 Russian edition conceded)
‘only a literary curiosity’. The 1882 preface, written just after the assassination
of Tsar Alexander II and two decades after the abolition of serfdom, does express
some uncertainty about the revolutionary role of the Russian peasantry. Could the
peasants’ form of ‘primeval common ownership of land pass directly to the higher
form of Communist common ownership?’ Marx and Engels cautiously conclude: ‘If
the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West,
so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land
may serve as the starting point for a communist development’ (Manifesto, pp. 53–4,
56).
Equally instructive for assessing Lenin’s Revolution is the preface to the 1892
Polish edition, which draws a contrast between Polish and Russian industrial development.
Noting a ‘decided progress of Polish industry’, Engels observes: ‘Russian
Poland, Congress Poland, has become the big industrial region of the Russian Empire.

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