Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

NOTES541474849The reference is to the nation- wide strike of railwaymen for higherwages. It started on the night of September 23 (October 6), 1917,and threw the Provisional Government into a panic. The bourgeoispress attacked the striking railwaymen.The strike was discussed by the Central Committee of theR.S.D.L.P.(B.) on September 24 (October 7), 1917. In an appeal,“Let’s Help the Railwaymen”, which was published in RabochyPut (The Workers’ Path), the Central Committee exposed thecounter- revolutionary policy of the Provisional Government andcalled on the proletariat to express full sympathy for the railwaymen,protect them from the provocative attacks of the counter- revolutionariesand do everything to prevent their strike from beingisolated and defeated. The strike ended on the night of September26 (October 9), 1917, when the Provisional Government satisfiedsome of the railwaymen’s demands. p. 81The reference is to the attitude of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotskyand their followers. Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed Lenin’s planfor an armed uprising, declaring that the working class of Russiawas incapable of carrying out a socialist revolution. They sliddown to the Menshevik position of demanding a bourgeois republic.Trotsky insisted on a postponement of the uprising until theSecond All- Russia Congress of Soviets, which meant frustratingthe insurrection because this gave the Provisional Governmenta chance to concentrate its forces on the opening day of the Congressand crush the uprising. p. 82Written at Vyborg in late September- October 1 (14), 1917. Firstpublished in the magazine Prosveshcheniye (Education) No. 1- 2for October 1917.Prosveshcheniye, a monthly Bolshevik theoretical journal legallypublished in Petersburg from December 1911 to June 1914. Ithad a peak circulation of 5,000.It was put out on Lenin’s suggestion, and contained contributionsfrom Vorovsky, Ulyanova- Yelizarova, Krupskaya, Olminskyand others. Gorky edited the belles-lettres section. Lenin directedits policy from Paris and then from Cracow and Poronin; he editedsome of the articles and kept up a regular correspondence withmembers of the editorial board.The magazine exposed opportunists—liquidators, otzovistsand Trotskyites—and also bourgeois nationalists, and reportedon the working- class struggle at the time of the new revolutionaryupsurge; it popularised Bolshevik slogans in the electoral campaignfor the Fourth Duma and opposed revisionism and centrism inthe parties of the Second International. It had a great part to playin educating forward- looking workers in Russia in the Marxistinternational spirit.On the eve of the First World War, in June 1914 it was closeddown by the tsarist government, and resumed publication in theautumn of 1917, but only one double issue was put out. p. 87