By JOÃO QUARTIM DE MORAES*
Excerpt from newly released book
From the democratic revolution to the October uprising
The longer a war drags on, the more destruction, hunger and despair it causes. The extremely harsh winter of 1916-1917 worsened the suffering of the population. On February 22, a strike movement broke out at the Putilov factory complex in Petrograd. The following day, a large demonstration of women, mostly textile workers, demanding bread and peace, marched through the factories on strike. The repercussions were widespread, spreading throughout the capital.
Violent clashes with police forces led the most determined demonstrators to attack police stations and arm themselves. By the 25th, about 250 workers had gone on strike. The tsar ordered the Petrograd military to suppress the popular mobilization with bullets. Blood flowed. But the soldiers of the Pavlovsky Regiment, refusing to shoot at the people, turned their weapons against the officers. The other regiments in the capital joined the uprising. On March 2, the tsar abdicated.
Many historians emphasize the spontaneous nature of the February Revolution. The initiative of the masses was certainly decisive from the beginning to the end of the revolt. However, unless we understand it too narrowly, as collective action not previously planned, the notion of spontaneity takes into account the collective memory of social struggles. The Russian working class, particularly in Petrograd, kept in its memory the revolutionary struggles of the workers of the Putilov industrial park, protagonists of the strikes that began in January 1905, days before “Bloody Sunday.”
The committees that coordinated the strikes gave rise to the soviets, which in the last months of 1905, mainly in Petrograd and Moscow, assumed the role of organs of proletarian political power. The workers of 1917 took up, on their own initiative, the revolutionary legacy of 1905, inscribed in their political culture.
The mobilization of Petrograd weavers on the second day of the protests that began the February Revolution, which was decisive in gaining broad support from the masses for the rebellion, became famous for linking the Russian people's struggle for peace and bread with women's struggle for equal rights. It is not always remembered that March 8, International Women's Day, honors the Petrograd workers. In the old Julian calendar, which was still in force in Russia, the date was February 23. For the same reason, the proletarian rebellion that overthrew tsarism went down in history as the February Revolution, although in the current Gregorian calendar it occurred in March.
As soon as they heard about the revolution, Lenin and the other Bolsheviks exiled in Switzerland were determined to return to Russia. The negotiations to cross war-torn Germany were complicated. It was not that the German government was displeased with letting these professional revolutionaries pass through, who would probably create problems for the new Russian government. But the latter, for that very reason, was in no hurry to see them back. It was only at the end of March, thanks to the support of the Swiss Social Democrats, that they were able to travel by train through Germany to Scandinavia and from there to Russia, where they arrived on the night of April 3, 1917.
Received by a large crowd of supporters at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg, Lenin made a speech in defense of the international socialist revolution. The following day, he appeared at the Tauride Palace, where the provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet had been installed. Before a large, surprised and perplexed social-democratic audience, he denied support for the provisional government and advocated transforming the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war.
Two articles published successively in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, on April 7 and 9, 1917, substantiate their theses in a synthetic way. In the first, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution”, also known as the “April Theses”, Lenin characterized the “present moment” as “transition of the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie […] for its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poor layers of the peasantry”.
In the second, “On the Duality of Powers”, based on the principle that “the fundamental problem of every revolution is that of power”, he points out that an “entirely original duality of power” was established by the February Revolution: “alongside […] the government of the bourgeoisie, another government was formed, […] the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which, considered in terms of its class composition, is a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasants (under the uniform of the soldier)”.
In the heat of the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries supported the Provisional Government. The duality of power was indisputable, but they could argue that the coexistence of opposing interests was the rule, not the exception, in bourgeois-democratic republics. Even Bolshevik militants and leaders rejected the proposal of the “April Theses” for a radical change in program and tactics. Lev Kamenev (1883-1936), then editor of the Pravda, published them reluctantly, including a note in which he noted his disagreements.
The audacious lucidity of the theses consisted in maintaining that the predominant interests of the provisional government were antagonistic to the fundamental demands of the population: peace and land. To meet them, it was necessary to overthrow the bourgeois government and transfer power to the soviets.
Pavel Milyukov (1859-1943), Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, confirmed in his own way the relevance of Lenin's radical positions, notably immediate peace. Leader of the right wing of the kadets, monarchist and warmonger, Milyukov sent a note to the Anglo-French allies on April 18, assuring them that Russia would continue the war “until final victory”.
It was the government itself that was putting an end to any hope of a short-term ceasefire. “Entirely tied to Anglo-French imperialist capital,” of which “Russian capital was a mere branch,” as Lenin had recalled in his “Letters from Afar” (written shortly before leaving his Swiss exile), the new government had no choice. After all, once the war had begun, the French government had extended credits of 3,5 billion gold francs to the Tsar to pay off the previous maturities of the “Russian bonds,” whose total value exceeded 10 billion gold francs; after the February Revolution of 1917, new loans were made to the provisional government.
As the April theses were being proven by the course of events, the opposition they had encountered in important circles of the Bolshevik Party was fading. Tirelessly and patiently, Lenin not only attended all the Party meetings but also visited the barracks and factories to explain his theses to the soldiers and workers. Thanks to his enormous effort, he managed to convince the majority to support the decisive change in the program and political line that his theses proposed; they were approved by the Bolshevik Conference, held between April 24 and 29.
In the Soviets, where the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were the majority, support for the provisional government prevailed, of which the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Aleksandr Kerensky was a member as Minister of Justice. On June 3, the First Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of Russia opened. Lenin defended the Bolshevik theses with his usual firmness, facing the sarcasm of the government supporters. He challenged them to reveal “the exorbitant profits obtained by the capitalists, reaching 500% and even 800%, in the supply of war materials”. It would be enough to arrest fifty or one hundred of the biggest millionaires for a few weeks to reveal the frauds that cost the country thousands and millions every day. He was applauded by some of the delegates, but the Congress ended up granting a vote of confidence to the government.
Meanwhile, having assumed the ministries of war and the navy, Kerensky decided to reinforce the contested authority of his government with a military victory, launching a major offensive against the Austro-Hungarians on 16 June. After initial success, the soldiers refused to continue the offensive. Kerensky then decided to send a detachment of the 1sto Machine Gun Regiment, stationed in Vyborg, on the outskirts of Petrograd.
But the regiment became insubordinate, because since the February Revolution, in which it had been a protagonist, its mission had been to defend the capital. The agitation against the war grew; the influence of the Bolsheviks among the soldiers and sailors grew. At the end of June, physically exhausted and in poor health, Lenin spent a few days in a Finnish village. There he learned that the demonstrations of July 3 and 4 against the government had prematurely assumed an insurrectionary character. Armed but uncoordinated, the demonstrators engaged in street battles against the Cossack shock troops who remained under the government's orders. Many died; the uprising was crushed.
The situation became extremely dangerous for the revolutionaries. British ambassador G. W. Buchanan (1854-1924) demanded Lenin's head at all costs, seeing him, not without lucidity, as a very serious threat. Kerensky, who had assumed the leadership of the government in July, zealously complied with the demand, arresting some of the main Bolshevik leaders, such as Kamenev, Trotsky, Lunacharsky and Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952).
Falsely accused by the government of betraying the country in favor of Germany, Lenin went into hiding, hiding in Razliv, a suburb of the capital. Prevented from attending the 26th Congress of the Bolshevik RSDLP, which met in Petrograd from July 3 to August 1878, he was represented by Stalin (1953-XNUMX), who was in charge of his security. It was up to him to present the Central Committee's report and the political resolution, which advocated armed insurrection towards a socialist revolution.
Throughout August, the prestige of the Bolsheviks increased rapidly, allowing the Party to count on about 240 militants. It increased even more in the resistance to the coup d'état carried out on August 27 by General Kornilov (1870-1918), commander of the Russian Army, who ordered the 3rdo Cavalry Corps, commanded by General Krymov (1871-1917), to occupy the capital under the pretext of preventing a Bolshevik coup. The episode still has areas of murkiness today: Kornilov would have initially acted in agreement with Kerensky, who was also interested in containing revolutionary unrest.
But would he have tried to overcome this by placing himself at the head of a counterrevolutionary dictatorship? A month earlier, in his article “The Beginning of Bonapartism,” published on July 29, Lenin had drawn attention to this risk. The fact is that, having lost control of the military intervention, Kerensky broke with the generals and appealed to the Petrograd Soviet and the Red Guards. The train carrying General Krymov to the capital was stopped by the railway workers; many of the Cossacks in his escort went over to the side of the Soviet. Krymov appeared before Kerensky to justify himself, but the latter sent him to a military tribunal. He chose suicide. Kornilov was arrested.
Although the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries rallied to defend Kerensky's government, the great victors of this dramatic episode were the Bolsheviks, who formed the dynamic center of resistance to the coup. In the weeks that followed, the provisional government lost what authority it had left. The war dragged on, the economic situation deteriorated, and the outlook grew darker.
From Finland (where he had once again taken refuge after leaving the suburb of Razliv in the early hours of August 8 to escape the police manhunt), Lenin sent the Party analyses of the situation in which he denounced the impotence of the provisional government in the face of “the approaching catastrophe” (the title of a lengthy pamphlet written from September 10 to 14). He characterized the situation as revolutionary and affirmed the urgency of preparing an insurrection, the success of which depended on three factors: (a) relying not on a conspiracy or a party, but on the vanguard class; (b) relying on the revolutionary impetus of the people; (c) occurring in an upward shift of the revolutionary forces.
The Central Committee received the call for an insurrection with reservations. Its members remembered the defeat of the uprisings that had taken place at the beginning of July. But these armed, improvised and uncoordinated actions had been firmly condemned by Lenin at the time, because popular illusions about the provisional government were still strong. It was because he discerned with foresight, two months later, that the situation had changed radically after the failure of the putsch of Kornilov that he considered the social conditions to seize power to have been met and matured.
Several Party leaders were hesitant to take the path of insurrection. To convince them, Lenin left his Finnish refuge in Helsinki on September 17 and returned to Russia with a shaved beard, his face disguised with makeup, a wig and rustic clothes. His speeches and writings during the last weeks of September focused on a single, decisive theme: organizing the seizure of power.
He stayed in the port city of Vyborg for three weeks; on October 7, he left for Petrograd, where he settled in the apartment of Margarita Fofanova (18831976-XNUMX), an “ardent Bolshevik,” as Nadiézhda Krupskaya wrote in her precious account of the days and hours leading up to the uprising. The apartment was in the neighborhood also called Vyborg, in a building inhabited almost exclusively by workers. The conditions of secrecy were rigorous. Krupskaya and Fofanova made the contacts; the address was kept strictly secret.
On the 10th, with Lenin present, the Central Committee met in another secret location to deliberate on the armed uprising. Of the twelve members present, ten voted in favor: Lenin, Sverdlov (1885-1919), Stalin, Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926), Trotsky, Uritsky (1873-1918), Kollontai, Bubnov (1883-1938), Sokolnikov (1888-1939) and Lomov (1888-1937). Zinoviev and Kamenev voted against, exercising their right to disagree on a decisive issue in contemporary history. Not content with this, however, they published in the Menshevik newspaper New Jizn statements condemning the plan to take power by force.
By making public a secret resolution, the premature disclosure of which could only benefit the enemy, the two men exasperated Lenin, who denounced them as saboteurs and demanded that they be expelled from the Party. But the insurrectionary dynamic was already activated and the episode had no major practical consequences. Late in the afternoon of October 24, Lenin left his hiding place and went to the Smolny Institute, where the insurrectionary general staff had gathered. He left Margarita Fofanova a short note with an affectionate irony: “I am going where you did not want me to go. Goodbye, Ilyich.”
*João Quartim de Moraes He is a retired full professor at the Department of Philosophy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The military left in Brazil (popular expression) [https://amzn.to/3snSrKg].
Reference
João Quartim de Moraes. Lenin: An Introduction. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2024, 142 pages. [https://amzn.to/4fErZPX]
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