Part 7: the April Theses

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«The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have onfirmed by history; but concretely things have worke ifferently; they are more original, more peculiar, ariegated than anyone could have expected.

To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after hose "old Bolsheviks" who more than once already have layed so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by citerating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of ludying the specific features of the new and living reality"

Letter be February revolution established dual power in sia. The power of the state I no longer the monopoly the old ruling class. State er was now divided betn the Provisional govern• (dominated to begin 1 by the Kadets, the rgeois liberal party.) and Soviets whose Executive amittee and membership ¿ dominated at the start by Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. bese two powers rested on the of two different opposed • classes - the Provisional inment's power on the bourie and landowners; that of the it on the working class and the id peasantry (the soldiers of the bese two powers were bound in long run to be irreconcilable. i such duality of power was dished then the historical posWorkers march ities became polarised: between the one side the establishment the power of the Provisional Emment which would have int full-scale counter-revolution, on the other side the establish* of Soviet power, which would • proletarian revolution.

BALANCE Ln uneasy balance might exist some time, but in the long term i was no middle way. In one eton or the other stable class i would have to be reestablished. The question of moving from democratic revolution to the blist revolution was not one ich simply existed in the minds the most audacious political kers: it was posed in the ation itself.

I is. of course, not hard to see Etrospect that the question was if the socialist leaders in the & But those on the spot either r it and sought to put it behind • ate an ugly spectre: or they been d out more Tactics (CW 24, 44).

(including the Bolsheviks); were still in March more or less united on three things: that the limits of the revolution were bourgeois and democratic; that consequently the role of the Soviet should be to give support, tempered perhaps with some pressure, to the Provisional Government; and that Russia should continue to participate in the war against Germany and its allies.

COOPERATE

All the socialist leaders were ready, therefore, with some reservations to cooperate with both the national and the international aims of the bourgeoisie.

Bolshevik policy was,, to start with, slightly to the leit of that of the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. This was due to the influence of Molotov who was then editing Pravda.

But in the middle of March; Stalin and Kamenev returned from exile in Siberia to take over the leadership of the party. They instantly • shifted the line to the right.

Trotsky quotes an example of their defencist position, supporting the Russian bourgeoisie in continuing the war, from Pravda of 15th March 1917:

"When one army stands opposed to another army | we read in one of its editorial articles], no policy could be more absurd than the policy of proposing that one of them should lay down arms and go home. Such a policy would not be a policy of peace, but a policy of enslavement, a policy to be scornfully rejected by a free people. No; the people will remain intrepidly at their post, answering bullet with bullet and shell with shell. This is beyond dispute. We must not allow any disorganization of the armed forces of the revolution"

He then points out: "We find here no mention of classes, of the oppressors and the oppressed; there is, instead, talk ot a 'free people'; there are no classes struggling for power but, instead, a free people are remaining at their through!"

Following this line, the policy of the Bolsheviks became indistinguishable from that of the Mensheviks and in many areas the two groups began operating as one organisation. By the beginning of April the revolutionary situation was sharpening; but the revolutionary party was being liquidated.

RETURN

This , was the situation which greeted Lenin on his return from Zurich on April 3rd. He was officially welcomed at the station by Chkeidze, the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, who expressed the hope that Lenin would work with the other Soviet leaders.

Lenin replied not to Chkeidze, whom he ignored, but to the workers and soldiers standing by; he referred to the imminence of the socialist revolution. The effect was electrifying; it was the first time that any leader of any party had made such a statement.

Lenin went straight to meet the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks to whom he expounded the ideas which were published two days later as the April Theses.

He attacked the view that the revolution was restricted to bourgeois and democratic objectives. Quite the contrary, he arguea, its gains could only be defended it it went on the become a proletarian revolution; this was the only way to resolve the instability of dual power. The Russian proletarian revolution would be a prelude to a European proletarian revolution.

APRON-STRINGS

Yet, in the face of these needs, the present Bolshevik leaders were still holding on to the old dirty apron strings' . They must abandon the proposals for unity with the Mensheviks, withdraw all support from the Provisional Government, and completely cease their support for the imperialist war:

'It is impossible to make a democratic peace, one that is not imposed by force, without destroying the power of capitalism...in order to bring a permanent end to war it is essential that the proletariat take power'.

One leading Bolshevik remarked that the effect of Lenin's intervention was like an exploding bomb'. His ideas were the opposite of the resolutions passed at the allRussia Party Conference the previous day under the guidance of Stalin and Kamenev.

Scarcely a single leading Bolshevik supported Lenin on any of the questions he had raised. When the April Theses were published in Pravda, the editors declared that:

'Lenin's scheme seems to us unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois revolution is ended, and counts on an immediate transformation of the revolution into a socialist In fact Lenin advocated not an immediate taking of power; he knew that support for that was not yet sufficient.

Before that, he proposed that the question should be preparea by tne patient explanation of his uncompromising policies to the working class. But even before that it was necessary to convince the party of his perspective BARRIER In this the greatest barrier would be the "old Bolsheviks" unable to come to grips with the new transformed situation. The Party was confronted with an urgent need to change. As Trotsky analysed Lessons of October:

"The fundamental instrument of in theo 70rssot17 even tak ng only one year, irom February 1917 to February 1918 -and on the basis of the supplementary experience in Finland Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria Germany, we can posit as almost an unalterable law that a party crisis is inevitable in the transition from the preparatory. revolutionary activity to the immediate struggle for power. Generally speaking crises arise in the party at every serious turn in the party's course, either as a prelude to the turn or as a consequence of it. The explanation for this lies in the fact that every period in the development of the party has special features of its own and calls for specific habits and methods of work. A tactical turn implies a greater or lesser break in these habits and methods. Herein lies the dirct and most immediate root of internal party friction and crises. "It happens all too frequently", wrote Lenin in July 1917, "that when history makes an abrupt turn, even the most advanced parties are unable for a longer or a shorter period of time to adapt themselves to new conditions. They keep repeating the slogans of yesterday - slogans which were correct yesterday, but wlich have lost all their meaning today, becoming devoid of meaning "suddenly" with the self-same "suddenness" that history makes its abrupt turn". Hence the danger arises that if the turn is too abrupt or too sudden, and if in the preceding period too many elements of inertia and conservatism have accumulated in the leading organs of the party, then the party proves itself unable to fulfil its leadership at that supreme and critical moment for which it has been preparing itself in the course of years or decades. The party is ravaged by a crisis, and the movement passes the party by - and heads towards defeat"

In fighting to reverse the policy of the Bolsheviks, Lenin was carrying out the fight necessary to prevent just such a defeat.

enin He knew that, however astonished were the Bolshevik leaders, however much they thought his ideas were anarchist or lunatic, thousands of Bolshevik workers and soldiers would immediately see the correctness of his line, since it was they who could most clearly see the real nature of the Provisional Government.

They had seen the efforts of the government (with help from the Soviets) to resist the eight-hour day or to send them to continue to fight against the workers of the German army.

Soldiers responded enthusiastically to Lenin's call for fraternisation, as workers responded to his demands to get rid of the capitalist ministers of the Provisional Government since these were their own bosses.

By the time of the next allRussia Party Conference on April 24th, Lenin's line had in formal terms won through.

Tha sanforanna fat arhich a total represented by 150 delegates) voted against wande with the Merovisional and branded Government as a government of landowners and capitalists' It made the call for a transfer of power to the working class in the belligerent countries in order to end the waI.

There remained however, leading Bolsheviks who continued to argue against these positions such as Dzerzhinsky, Kamenev and Kalinin.

Stalin preserved a politic silence. And on two issues Lenin remained in a minority of one: on his demand to s break with the Zimmerwald grouping of social democrats and to change the name of the party to the Communist But in less than a month Lenin had begun to reforge the Bolshevik Party into a revolutionary party. The backwardness and conservatism of the old leaders had suffered an irrevocable reverse.

Partly this success was because the speed of events in the revolution made it clearer how Lenin was correct about the needs and possibilities.

At the end of March, Miliukov, the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Goverriment, had made a declaration that Russia rejected territorial annexations in the war but supported "complete observance of the obligations undertaken to our allies" • This had been welcomed by the Petrograd Soviet - and by Pravda!

Then in April, Miliukoy, asked by the Soviet leaders to repeat his pledge, spoke of:

"the universal desire to carry the world war through to a decisive victory".

He expressed contidence that the victors:

"will find a means to attain those guarantees and sanctions, which are necessary for the prevention of new bloody conflicts in the future"

In the thieves' jargon of diplomacy, as Trotsky pointed out, this meant nothing less than annexations and indemnities.

PROVOCATION

This was not what the Soviet leaders wanted to hear. They realised that it would act as a naked provocation to the workers and soldiers. On April 17th, Miliukov staged a grotesque demonstration of wounded and limbless ex-soldiers with banners demanding "War to the end!"

The next day his message was published in the press and, before the Soviet had even discussed it, tens of thousands of armed soldiers were on the streets in protest.

Pactories stonned and workers

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IST PRESS. Wednesder "ih Apri 19°5