PRAGOTI

In 1916, Lenin lived in exile in Switzerland. The 1905 Russian Revolution had ended in defeat. The Social Democratic Party had been torn in many directions, and now was dominated by a section whose main ideology, Lenin wrote, "was a parody of Marxism." International Social Democracy had been devastated by the reaction of its leadership to World War I. When the German Social Democratic Party voted on behalf of the war in the Summer of 1914, Lenin declared, "This is the end of the Second International."

In the Spring of 1915, two small conferences in the Swiss Alps attempted to rebuild an anti-war socialist international. A women's conference was initiated by the editorial board of Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) and by Clara Zetkin, the Secretary of the International Women's Organization. A youth conference followed a few months later. These gatherings enthused Lenin, although he was disappointed that they took a pacifist line. He founded a journal, Kommunist, and helped to organize another conference in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald in August 1915. The delegates that came here spent four days on two sides of a fine line. Lenin, Zinoviev and Karl Radek argued that war could not be stopped by pacifism, while more moderate leaders wanted to raise the slogan of peace. For Lenin, the war-mongering imperialists would not be moved by calls to peace. Lenin's position prevailed, after Trotsky tried to mediate the two sides. "Never," the Zimmerwald document appealed, "has war killed war. On the contrary, it awakens a desire for revenge; violence breeds violence. Thus, after every sacrifice you make, your tormentors will demand more sacrifices. It is a vicious circle from which the bourgeois pacifists will never extricate you. There is only one-way to prevent war: the conquest of political power by the working class and the abolition of capitalist property. A 'durable peace' can only be the result of a socialist victory."

In late 1915, such a wish seemed improbable. War raged across Europe, the working-class movement had been disrupted by the universal conscription, and the parties of Social Democracy had been compromised by the bloodshed. The main anti-war leaders and their small political formation worked in exile, and those who remained in their countries could only operate in a clandestine fashion. Lenin's 1902 book, What is to be Done?, provided a guide to many socialists: it counseled the cadre to build organization to prepare for a change of circumstances. When the spontaneous strikes broke out in the St. Petersburg factories in 1896, Lenin argued, the "revolutionaries lagged behind this upsurge, both in their 'theories' and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organization capable of leading the whole movement." There was work to be done, but nonetheless the conclusions of the Zimmerwald conference were audacious. The state of the world at that time did not presage the development of a revolutionary wave anywhere around the European continent. In January 1917, Lenin visited young workers at the Zurich People's House, where he encouraged them, "We must be not be deceived by the present grave-like stillness in Europe. Europe is pregnant with revolution."

And then, the audacity was confirmed. In February-March 1917, the Tsarist autocracy crumbled before a wave of protests across Russia. In five brief letters ("Letters from Afar"), Lenin assessed the situation and quickly proposed the path to follow. Keep in mind that he was in Zurich, in exile, and only hearing of the revolution from the St. Petersburg newspapers. Lenin, supple with his Marxism, was quickly able to grasp the situation and to make theory of it. The basic points he reiterated were as follows:

(1) A new bourgeoisie had gradually superseded the Tsarist autocracy since 1905, since it was this class that had dominated the new institutions (local government bodies, public education, congresses of various types, and the Duma, the Russian parliament). Because "this new class was already 'almost completely' in power by 1917, [it therefore] needed only the first blows to bring tsarism to the ground and clear the way for the bourgeoisie.
(2) The actors who produced the "first blow" were the organized working-class and their kith and kin, as well as the peasantry, and the petty bourgeoisie. The 1905 Revolution prepared them for this action. "The first revolution (1905) deeply ploughed the soil, uprooted age-old prejudices, awakened millions of workers and tens of millions of peasants to political life and political struggle and revealed to each other – and to the world – all classes (and all of the principle parties) of Russian society in their true character and in the true alignment of their interests, their forces, their modes of action, and their immediate and ultimate aims."
(3) The aims of those who conducted the revolution were simple: not only did they want to do away with the Tsarist autocracy, but they wanted three things: Peace, Bread and Freedom. These three demands became the slogan of the Bolsheviks, the minority wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party, led by Lenin.
(4) The new government, led by Kerensky, was not capable of delivering the people's demands. It was a bourgeois government, which wanted to continue the war on a more "rational" basis. The ministers in this new government were "representatives and leaders of the entire landlord and capitalist class. They are bound by the interests of capital. The capitalists can no more renounce their interests than a man can lift himself up by the bootstraps."
(5) The Revolution had created its own organization, alongside that of the government: the Soviets. Lenin wrote, still from Zurich, that the Bolsheviks should demand that the people be formed into militias and armed. The workers, spontaneously drawing from the experience of 1905, "have set up a Soviet of Workers' Deputies; they have begun to develop, expand and strengthen it by drawing in soldiers' deputies, and, undoubtedly, deputies from rural wage-workers, and then (in one form or another) from the entire peasant poor." The proletariat, Lenin continued, "must organize and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands, in order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power."
(6) Russian society was in a situation of dual power, with the government of Kerensky in charge of the formal apparatus of the state, and the working-class in charge of the Soviets, the organs of popular power that had been set up in the major population centers. Kerensky's grab of the state institutions was the first revolution. Lenin now anticipated the need for a second revolution, one led by the Soviets who would set themselves up as the real government and "smash" the state machinery.
(7) The new Soviet state, further, would need to immediately take charge of the distribution of food and necessary supplies to an impoverished and desperate population. These must be done by the men and women of the Soviets, but with the consciousness that "these measures do not yet constitute socialism. They concern the distribution of consumption, not the reorganization of production. They would not yet constitute the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' only the 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry.' It is not a matter of finding a theoretical classification. We would be committing a great mistake if we attempted to force the complete, urgent, rapidly developing practical tasks of the revolution into the Procrustean bed of narrowly conceived 'theory,' instead of regarding theory primarily and predominantly as a guide to action."

The Letters from Afar went to Clara Zetkin in Oslo, and then were published in St. Petersburg in Pravda, the paper of the Bolsheviks. These letters cautioned the Party not to put any trust in the first revolution, but to begin to strength the Soviets, and to anticipate an inevitable second revolution. "Before February 1917," Lenin wrote, "the immediate task was to conduct bold revolutionary-internationalist propaganda, summon the masses to fight, rouse them. The February-March days required the heroism of devoted struggles to crush the immediate enemy – Tsarism. Now we are in transition from that first stage of the revolution to the second, from 'coming to grips' with Tsarism to 'coming to grips' with landlord and capitalist imperialism. The immediate task is organization, not only in the stereotyped sense of working to form stereotyped organizations, but in the sense of drawing unprecedented broad masses of the oppressed classes into an organization that would take over the military, political and economic functions of the state." This would be the Soviets, and it would be the instrument to smash the ancient state apparatus that bore within its institutions the oppression of the people.

Having said this much, Lenin boarded a train, and headed into the second revolution's cauldron.