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Part Two “From Tsarism to Revolution, 1894-1917” (Chapter 1 of Text)

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905

Tsarist Russian Political Expansion in the Far East: Tsarist Russia had established its political-military influence in Manchuria by the treaty rights conceded by the Manchu Dynasty to allow Russia to construct the Chinese Eastern Railway and South Manchurian Railway in 1896 and 1898. The Chinese Eastern Railway ran through central Manchuria as part of the Trans-Siberian Railway which then ran southeast of Manchuria to the Russian maritime seaport of Vladivostok. The Chinese Eastern Railway was headquartered in Harbin, from which the South Manchurian Railway ran down to the warm-water seaport of Port Arthur on the Darien Peninsula (today Lushun) across the Yellow Sea from Korea. The Russian government was also accorded the right to establish a garrison of ground troops all along the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian Railways and granted a “leasehold” (effective governing authority) in the entire tip of the Darien Peninsula where the seaport of Port Arthur was situated. Japanese Expansion Political Expansion in the Far East: This brought Tsarist Russia into potential conflict with Japan. Japan, which was first Asian nation to industrialize following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, had become an imperialist power in the Far East, especially after her military victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. After its decisive victory over the decaying Manchu Dynasty, Japan under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) forced China to cede to Japan the Island of Formosa (today Taiwan) encompassing 13,973 square miles) some eighty miles off the southeast coast of China and the Pescadores Islands lying directly off the southeast coast of China. Between the two areas lies the strategic Taiwan Straits separating the East China Sea from the South China Sea. Japan also wished to annex Korea but was restrained from immediately doing so by the intervention of Russia and the western powers. The Outbreak of Russian-Japanese Military Hostilities: Russia, then, under Admiral Evgenii Alekseev who was appointed Russian Viceroy of the Far East in 1903, sought to establish its influence in northern Korea in 1903. The Tsarist government gained a “Yalu Concession” from the Manchu government that granted Russia the right exploit certain timber reserves south of the Yalu River, which demarcated the Manchurian-Korean border. Russia, under its military leader Alexander Bezobrazov, asserted an expansive stance under its Yalu Concession which Japan saw as threatening a dividing line between Russian and Japanese influence in Korea at the 38th parallel.

On February 3, 1904 Japan broke off diplomatic relations with the Tsarist government, and on February 8, 1905 launched a surprise attack on the Far Eastern Russian fleet anchored at Port Arthur. Beyond its outright damage, the attack effectively sealed off the rest of the Russian Far Eastern Fleet anchored at Port Arthur, which initially consisted of seven battleships, seventeen cruisers, and twenty-five destroyers.

The Conduct of the Russo-Japanese War: Japanese land forces then immediately invaded southern Manchuria sealing off a large contingent of more than 100,000 Russian troops stationed at Port Arthur. With the Far Eastern Fleet trapped at anchorage and Russian military forces at Port Arthur cut off from supplies, the Russian military forces, after a heroic 148-day defense of the besieged seaport, surrendered on December 19, 1904. The Japanese meanwhile began a military advance to eventually take Mukden (today Shenyang), the capital of Manchuria 230 miles to the north on February 25, 1905, after a heroic and bloody stance by Russian forces in the first land battle of modern weaponry capable of exponential destruction. More than 600,000 troops were engaged for the battle of Mukden on the two sides. The loss of Mukden was a great military defeat for the Russian land forces, which had grown from 130,000 to over 1,000,000 men. But it was by no means a rout as the Russian land forces engaged in an orderly tactical retreat further to the railhead of Harbin 300 miles further north. What critically undermined the Russia war effort, was the demise of its naval forces. The Far Eastern Fleet had tried to break out of its naval blockade at Port Arthur on August 10, 1904, to join the other Russian naval forces of the Far East Eastern at Vladivostok 600 miles to the northeast. But the Japanese naval forces under Admiral Togo were waiting and sank all five battleships of the Russian Far Eastern Fleet stationed at Port Arthur, along with one

20 cruiser and three destroyers. To replace this loss, Russia dispatched its Baltic Sea Fleet, stationed at Saint Petersburg. This meant that an enormous Russian fleet of consisting of eight battleships, twelve cruisers, and nine destroyers that left Saint Petersburg on October of 1904 had to sail halfway around the world, 20,500 miles, around the cape of South Africa, to reach the Far East.

Again, Admiral Togo was waiting, knowing that in order to rendezvous with the remainder of the Far Eastern Fleet at Vladivostok, the Baltic Fleet would have to pass through the narrow Tsushima Straits between the southern tip of Korea and Japan. On May 27-29, 1905 (O.S.) Togo’s own fleet was therefore positioned to execute the classical naval maneuver of “crossing-the-t,” that is, to fire broadside at the Russian fleet as it passed through the Tsushima Straits. In a matter of a few hours the Russian Far Eastern Fleet was decimated: the Japanese naval forces sank four Russian battleships, seven cruisers, and five destroyers, with most of the rest of the fleet being dispersed to neutral ports. Only one cruiser and two destroyers reached Vladivostok. This second victory of Admiral Togo has enshrined him as Japan’s greatest naval hero to this very day; and, forced the Tsarist government to quickly sue for peace, as it was not only faced with a completely decimated naval force but increasing revolutionary unrest at home.

The Treaty of Portsmouth Ending the Russo-Japanese War: With the Japanese in possession of southern Manchuria, and the Russian military holding the line in northern Manchuria, and enormous casualties mounting on both sides, both governments accepted the invitation of American President Theodore Roosevelt to enter into peace negotiations at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Beyond the goal of peace itself Roosevelt was concerned about the rise of Japanese power in Asia, especially as it might threaten the “Open Door” policy advocated by the United States against unilateral western concessions in China. The talks opened on August 10, 1905 and were concluded after just ten session with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth on September 5, 1905. Despite Japan’s holding the upper hand, the terms of the Treaty were by no means humiliating for Russia. The terms of the Treaty called for Russia to transfer to Japan the South Manchurian Railway and its leasehold of the Darien Peninsula with the seaport of Port Arthur. Russia was also forced to recognize Japanese sovereignty over the southern half of oil-rich Sakhalin Island lying north of the Japanese home islands and off the coast of the Russian Maritime Province. Likewise, the treaty affirmed Japan’s “paramount interest” in Korea. Subsequently, in 1911, Japan annexed Korea. But Russia still retained control of the Chinese Eastern Railroad and paramount power in northern Manchuria. Noteworthy, was that Russia immediately began to build an additional railroad track to the Maritime Province in Russian territory around northern Manchuria.

Revolutionary Discontent and the 1905 Revolution in Russia Political Disaffection within Russia Society: The general Russian population had little interest in a war fought for imperial ambitions in the Far East some 4,000 miles removed from European Russian. As the casualties mounted, popular disaffection continued to grow, especially in the ranks of the working class and the peasantry but even among an emerging capitalist entrepreneurial class. The capitalist entrepreneurial class organized itself as a separate political party under the heading of Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) in 1905. The Kadet Party was headed by Paul Miliukov, a professor of law who for a time taught at the University of Chicago in the United States. The Constitutional Democrats called for a democratic republic where the freedoms of capitalist enterprise would better flourish than under Tsarist autocracy which still restricted the free migration of labor from the countryside to the cities, and which still regulated the path of national industrial development.

Popular disaffection was exacerbated when on “Bloody Sunday,” January 9, 1905, protestors of the working class and peasantry sought to peacefully petition the Tsar to respond to their demand for “peace and bread” (mir i khleb). For the working class, it was a call for trade union reforms comparable to those in western Europe; for the peasantry it was a call for the end of redemption payments and black distribution in the expropriation of the 45% of the land still held by the landlord estates. Instead of dialogue, the Tsarist government allowed a brutal dispersal of the protesters by Cossack cavalrymen killing more than 200 unarmed protesters and injuring many more. Bloody Sunday undermined faith in Tsarist rule, even many among the faithful as well as Marxists and Socialist-Revolutionaries.

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Beginning in the spring of 1905, peasant outrage against the landlord class erupted into open rebellion which threatened another Pugachev revolution on the countryside. Peasant raiding parties not only seized the livestock and grain of the landlord estates, but in some cases set landlord manor houses to the torch. The most destructive cases of peasant outrage occurred in the rich black soil region of Chernigov in the Ukraine and the Saratov region of the Volga where some 3,000 manor houses set ablaze. The Peace of Portsmouth which the most astute of Tsarist advisor, Count Sergei Witte, hoped would assuage popular unrest failed to do so. Witte therefore warned Tsar Nicholas II, who had secluded himself in the royal Winter Palace outside of the inner-city of Saint Petersburg, that civil unrest had reached the point where if Nicolas wanted to stay in power he had only two choices: either to consent to a new political order of constitutional monarchy, or to resort to a direct military dictatorship. And Witte declared that he would have no part of the latter.

For once in his reign, Nicholas exercised sound political judgment and agreed to foreswear autocracy in favor of constitutional monarchy. On October 17, 1905 the Nicolas issued an ukaz from the throne in which he promised to rule under a regime of parliamentary rule that included freedom of expression and political association. The Tsarist ukaz has popularly come to be called “The October Manifesto.”

The Emergence of Soviets: The October Manifesto did not immediately quell the revolutionary tide, however. On October 20, 1905, the All-Russian Union of Railroad Workers and Employees headquartered in Saint Petersburg, declared a strike – an action forbidden by the Tsarist government – to demand an eight-hour workday. A wave of strikes then spread of other cities in various sectors of industrial employment; and within a matter of days Russia was in the grip of a general strike aimed at political as well as economic goals. As such, the strike movement was accompanied by establishment of Soviets of Workers’ Deputies on October 26, 1905, first in Saint Petersburg and then in Moscow and some other fifty cities.

The Soviets were armed political detachments of the working class who elected “deputies” of local self-rule, whose deputies then elected a body of deputies which acted a central organ city-wide organization of Soviet rule. Soviet power also spread to the countryside in the establishment of Soviets of Peasants deputies. Each Soviet organ was comprised of some 500 members, whose executive committee elected deputies to what became a national All-Russian Executive Committee of Peasants and Workers’ Deputies. To ensure their independent political power the Soviets established a “Red Guard” as a military command center in each of the Soviets. Lenin would later describe the Soviets as an organization of “self-acting bodies” of political rule as “direct descendants” of the Paris Commune of 1871. The Political Composition of the Soviets: By the time of the emergence of the Soviets in Russia the split in the Marxist movement between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the Second Party Congress in 1903 had so hardened that the two groups were operating as separate organizations under independent leaderships, with V.I. Lenin heading the Bolsheviks and Julius Martov heading the Mensheviks. And the two groups advanced a different perspective on the outcome of the Soviet revolutionary movement of 1905.

The Mensheviks under Martov called for the Soviets to force the complete ouster of Tsarist rule in favor of a democratic republic for the accelerated development of the capitalist stage of economic development, along what was accepted as the traditional lines of Marist theory. To this extent, Martov and the Mensheviks, who were the majority Marxist party in the Soviets in Saint Petersburg, called for “action only from below,” that is, to allow the Constitutional Democrats to act as the leading political force to exclusively seize revolutionary power in a provisional revolutionary government to institute a democratic republic to supersede Tsarist rule.

But the Bolsheviks under Lenin called for “action from above.” As opposed to a provisional revolutionary government constituted by the Constitutional Democrats, Lenin called for a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” In which the proletariat and the poor peasantry would not only combine to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution in alliance the rich peasantry for black distribution of the land against the landlords, but then to immediately proceed on to a socialist revolutionary with the poor peasantry. Lenin argued that, on the one hand, the Constitutional Democrats would not commit themselves to a thorough-going democratic republic because they depended upon Tsarist autocracy to protect their minority capitalist class economic exploitation. And, on the other hand, any democratic revolution must represent the interests of an

22 ultimate economic class majority, that is, the proletariat and the poor peasantry, and it must be a dictatorship to preclude any return to capitalist rule.

The Restoration of Tsarist Authority: Confronted by the challenge of the Soviets, Count Witte advised Nicolas to bide his time. Witte recognized that a general strike is easier to start than to sustain because a breakdown in economic production soon leads to hunger and cold; and by early November the strike movement did subside and collapse. On November 26, 1905, the Tsarist police were in a position to arrest the Chairman of the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviets in Saint Petersburg, and this was followed by wholesale arrests of all the other members of the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviets in Saint Petersburg on December 3, 1905. In Moscow a last ditch effort was made to preserve Soviet power in its Presnia workers’ district, where workers took to military barricades in the narrow streets. Rather than face the threat of ongoing sniper fire in such a venue, as seen in the revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848, the Tsarist government called on the Simionovskii Regiment of hardened military professionals to simply bombard the Presnia workers’ district with artillery fire until the last stronghold of Soviet resistance capitulated. The Presnia workers’ district capitulated in December 1905 after the artillery fire had killed a thousand workers. With this, the final phase of the Russian Revolution of 1905 came to an end.

The Constitutional Order of the Last Phase of Romanov Rule

The Fundamental Laws of the Constitutional Order: In response to the promise of a constitutional monarchy of the October Manifesto, a set of “Fundamental Laws” was drawn up under the principal direction of Count Witte. The Fundamental Laws functioning as a type of constitution were disappointing to those who sought a full-fledged parliamentary democracy along the lines of British constitutional monarchy. The basic provisions of the Fundamental Laws called for the following:

(1) Freedom of Speech and Political Association: This provision was largely respected by the Tsarist

government subject only to the limitation against a call for the violent overthrow of the new Tsarist political order.

(2) A Bicameral Legislative Body: The bicameral legislative body was composed of a lower house called the

State Duma and an upper house called the State Council. The entire membership of the State Duma was elected by universal suffrage, but the representatives were elected from geographical districts with each geographical district having the same number of representatives regardless of population size. Hence, the less populous rural agricultural legislative districts had the same voting power as the more populous urban working-class legislative districts. By the same token, half of the membership to the State Council was appointed by the Tsarist government.

(3) Executive Authority for the Introduction of all Legislation: All legislation had to be introduced by the Tsar through his self-appointed Council of Ministers. This meant that the only effective power of the legislature was to veto rather than to introduce legislation.

(4) Complete Tsarist Authority over the Executive Branch of Government: All government ministers were both appointed and dismissed by the Tsar on his own authority. The legislative branch of government had no power of investiture or censure as in the more advanced parliamentary democracies of western Europe.

(5) Tsarist Authority to Prologue the Legislature: The Tsar had the option to dissolve the State Duma at any time and to rule by decree during the transition period between new elections. This gave the Tsarist government still more authority over the content of legislative policy.

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(6) Tsarist Exclusive Authority to Amend the Constitution: The Tsar alone was given the authority to amend the constitution rather than through legislative action or through a popular referendum.

The Response of the Political Parties: The Fundamental Laws fell far short of a political regime sought not just the Marxist political groups and the Socialist Revolutionaries (Populists), but even the perspective of the Constitutional Democrats. Only a group of “Octobrists” being to the right of the Constitutional Democrats accepted the Fundamental Laws as an acceptable political given. Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks called for a boycott of the First Duma, which was convened by the Tsar on April 27, 1906. The Socialist Revolutionaries also called for a boycott of the First Duma. The Constitutional Democrats did opt to elect members to the First Duma, but with the hope of using its deputy strength as the single largest party to pressure the Tsarist government to broaden the political framework of the Fundamental Laws towards a more thorough-going parliamentary democracy. The Bolsheviks under Lenin changed their strategy when the Second Duma was convened on February 20, 1907, and ran a slate of delegates to sit in the State Duma. Lenin reasoned that the guarantee of parliamentary immunity, that is, the right to speak freely on the floor of the legislature, could be used to promote agitational propaganda for his own Bolshevik program especially among the peasantry. Lenin noted this opportunity in viewing the proceedings of the First Duma. The First Duma and Agricultural Reform: The First Duma, although formally elected to serve a five-year term, lasted only for two-and-a half months, from April 27, 1906 to July 9, 1906. This was largely due to the fact that, although boycotted by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, a new peasant political organization called the Trudoviks (“Toilers”), called for the same program of “black redistribution” as the Socialist Revolutionaries. As the second largest political organization in the First Duma with 100 seats next to the Constitutional Democrats with 180 seats (of a total of 524 seats), the Trudoviks were supported by the Constitutional Democrats in their demand for land reform. The Tsarist government, on the other hand, clung to the protection of the landlord estates to maintain the support of the landlord class as the chief anchor of Tsarist political power. The outcome was that, together, the Trudoviks and the Constitutional Democrats repeatedly blocked Tsarist introduced legislation, leading the Tsar to prologue the First Duma in short order.

Lenin recognized an important consideration of this outcome. On the one hand, the peasantry was as politically inspired as ever to achieve land reform. But, on the other hand, the Trudovik peasant political organization and its ally, the Constitutional Democrats, were prepared to carry on the struggle for land reform within the framework of the State Duma, hopefully by expanding the power of the State Duma itself as the democratic voice of the people; while the Socialist-Revolutionary peasant political organization was committed to carry on the struggle for land reform by extra-legal political terror. In 1906 and 1907, the terrorist organ of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, (the “combat organization”—boevaia organizatsiia) went on a rampage in the assassination of some 3,000 Tsarist officials and landlords to bring down all Tsarist rule under its landlord support. Tsar Nicolas responded by appointing Peter Stolypin (an Octobrist) as the new President of his Council of Ministers to replace the first President of his Council of Ministers Ivan Goremykin.

With the First Duma being prorogued in July, Stolypin was given summary authority to deal with the peasant revolutionary unrest in the countryside. On the one hand, Stolypin sought to appease the peasantry, especially the poor peasantry, by writing off all existing redemption payments to the state as of January 7, 1907. At the time, peasantry redemption payments to the state amounting to 1.1 trillion rubles had been refinanced to extend into the 1950s. This meant that each peasant household gained immediate outright title to its household plot. But it also meant an end to communal redistribution, and the full onset of western-style commercial agriculture on the model of the “American farmer.” As such, the poor peasantry would ultimately see little improvement in its impoverished plight, because it would fail to be able to successfully compete with the rich peasantry possessed not only of the enterprising spirit of a commercial farmer but also because of his ownership of machinery and draft animals already far outstripped that of the poor peasantry who, according to Lenin’s statistics, barely possessed a single horse and plow.

Stolypin was fully aware of the economic condition of the poor peasantry and actually saw it as contributing to the overall industrialization of the Russian state. Namely, that the poor peasantry would more and more be

24 driven off the land by the competitive advantage of the rich peasant, which in turn would mean that the poor peasant population would more and more become a source of urban labor required by the take-off of Russian industrialization from the 1880s onward. By the same token, the rich peasant, always seeking to expand his capitalist wealth in land holdings would not only buy up the land of the poor peasantry but also that of an indolent landlord class. And to do this, the rich peasant would invest ever higher in capital machinery to reach an ever higher productive agricultural output of a hired peasant labor force that he would employ, and this, in turn, would meet the higher demand for urban food consumption. Stolypin referred to this overall outcome of his agricultural program based on the entrepreneurial rich peasant as “placing a wager on the strong.” In fact, the entrepreneurial capacity of the rich peasant had already begun to be manifest in the early twentieth century, when, by 1914, Russia, historically a marginal producer of its own food supply due to the climate and soil, primitive agricultural methods, and communal redistribution, suddenly became a leading European exporter of grain.

But Stolypin was equally committed to the forceful repression of the terrorist activity that raged in the countryside, especially against the landlord class as the chief political underpinning of Tsarist rule. On August 19, 1906, Stolypin issued a declaration of martial law that gave the Tsarist Okrana carte blanche authority to arrest and convict in military courts anyone suspected of terrorist conspiracy against the Crown or the landlord class. And from September 1906 to May 1907, government retribution was responsible for the execution of 1,144 suspected terrorists by hanging (popularly known as “Stolypin’s necktie”). In retaliation Stolypin himself was assassinated on September 14, 1911, while attending an opera and sitting in a box next to the Tsar.

Lenin on the Duma the Peasantry: As peasant revolutionary activity in countryside in the spring of 1905 began to threaten the very existence of Tsarist political rule, Lenin called his Bolshevik followers to a Russian Social-Democratic Third Party Congress in London from April 25 to May 10, 1905. The Third Party Congress was an all-Bolshevik affair insofar as it was boycotted by the Mensheviks, who were aware that it was already stacked by Lenin with his own political supporters. At this Congress, Lenin immediately changed the qualification for Bolshevik Marxist party membership to “participation in” and not just “cooperation with” the revolutionary activity of the Marxist political movement. And critically important, Lenin called for the revolutionary activity in the struggle against Tsarist rule to advance a Marxist socialist-political orientation under Bolshevik political leadership. This was directly connected with Lenin’s appreciation of the revolutionary consciousness of the peasantry as a whole in its rampage against the landlord class in its quest for a black redistribution of the soil, and equally the class conflict Lenin saw within the peasantry between the rich peasantry and the poor peasantry.

Lenin combined his appreciation of the revolutionary consciousness of the Russian peasantry with his notion of the role that an intellectual Marxist revolutionary consciousness to advance what he declared to be a correct Marxist political leadership in the overthrow of Tsarist rule in Russia. Lenin, in one of his most famous works, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, written in June and July of 1905, counter-posed his approach to the 1905 Revolution to that of the Mensheviks, who met in a separate Conference held approximately at the same time of the Bolshevik Third Party Congress.

First, Lenin saw only the Russian peasantry and the Russian working-class as the only two class forces that were whole-heartedly committed to the overthrow of Tsarism as a form of continued authoritarian rule under the Fundamental Laws. Here, Lenin vehemently castigated the Mensheviks for arguing that it was the bourgeois capitalist class that was the primary force historically ordained to overthrow Tsarist rule in order to abolish all feudal rule on the countryside, and clear the ground for the full-fledged development of capitalism in the countryside. Lenin argued that the capitalist class by the very nature of its minority economic exploitation must depend on special professional police and military recruited from a landlord class to suppress an exploited majority. To entrust the democratic revolution to overthrow tsarism to the bourgeois capitalist class was another form of political opportunism, that is, objectively liquidating Marxist socialist hegemony over the Russian revolutionary movement.

A truly revolutionary Marxist party, must organize the proletariat and the peasantry as the only full-fledged revolutionary class forces committed to the total abolition of Tsarist rule. This was because their economic class interests demanded the total abolition of Tsarist rule: the proletariat because of the Tsarist protection of capitalist exploitation, the peasantry because of the Tsarist protection of landlord agricultural privilege. Lenin therefore called for a “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” to seize and hold power by force in

25 a provisional revolutionary to establish a “democratic republic” spearheading the rule of a true Marxist economic class majority as the basis of any true democratic rule.

But for Lenin the establishment of a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” would be the basis of a two-stage “uninterrupted” (nepreryvnaia) revolutionary movement, it would constitute the “overturning” (perevorot) of tsarist political rule as the first step toward a second immediate step in establishing the “socialist dictatorship of the proletariat” supported by the poor peasantry. Lenin’s thinking was that they poor peasantry, already disabused of commercial capitalist agriculture by its economic bondage to the entrepreneurial big peasantry was already a “rural proletariat” in its political consciousness; and with a tradition of peasant communal agriculture, the poor peasantry, under Bolshevik political leadership, would opt to join the urban proletariat in “workers’ associations” of large-scale agricultural cooperatives with the total nationalization of the land.

The class collaboration of the poor peasantry with the rich peasantry, which was committed to capitalist commercial agriculture under private agricultural holdings, would therefore immediately be transformed into class conflict, once the proletariat and the combined peasantry had overthrown Tsarist rule and expropriated the agricultural estates of the nobility as the supportive class of Tsarist political rule. Under such a scenario, the capitalist element of the democratic revolution in the alliance with the proletariat and whole of the peasantry, including the rich peasantry, would immediately “grow over” (pererastanie) into the socialist revolution of an alliance of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. The dictatorship proletariat and the poor peasantry as a rural proletariat would, in turn, still claim the overwhelming political support of a class majority of the proletariat and the poor peasantry as a rural proletariat.

Here it is to noted that Lenin’s wording of a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” expressed a Hegelian dialectical principle of the unity of opposites. Opposition, in the socialist revolution to the bourgeois democratic revolution was only an aspect or phase of the coming-to-be of a final democratic class majority in the proletariat and the poor peasantry superseding an initial class majority of the proletariat and the whole peasantry. And dictatorship in opposition to freedom is only an aspect of the coming-to-be of true freedom in ensuring that a final democratic socialist class majority of the proletariat and the poor peasantry would not be threatened by an political return to capitalist rule.

In Two Tactics Lenin did not yet specify what kind of government apparatus would be necessary to constitute the political rule of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” but he came to see the Soviets as established in the Russian Revolution of 1905 as the proper “organs of “revolutionary power” established as “self-acting bodies of armed men” constituted in the proletariat and the peasantry. Later in his classic work, The State and Revolution Lenin would expand on how the Soviets as “self-acting bodies of armed men” were by their very organizational structure organs of revolutionary power designed for socialist rule.

What Lenin did not want to see was for the poor peasantry to side with the rich peasantry in the division of all the land into private commercial agricultural holdings—which is what the Trudoviks and Constitutional Democrats called for—leading to a lengthy intervening stage capitalist of capitalist development and capitalist political rule. Lenin’s entire strategy of immediate ongoing revolution from a capitalist revolutionary force to a socialist revolutionary force was predicated on his emphasis of socialist revolutionary political consciousness rather than on the traditional Marxist identity of a concomitant mature development of the forces of production—a position already broached in his earlier work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. And it was to disabuse the poor peasantry of any inclination to support the individual privatization of the land after black redistribution that Lenin called on his Bolsheviks to run candidates for the following Dumas to be able use parliamentary immunity to speak against privatization of the land in a national public forum.

The Status of the Following Dumas: The Mensheviks as well as the Bolsheviks ran candidates for the Second Duma; only the Socialist Revolutionaries continued their boycott. With the Marxist parties and the Trudoviks and Constitutional Democrats controlling a majority of the seats (281 of the 524 seats), and all calling for abolition or reform of the Fundamental Laws of Tsarist rule, and all calling for some form of expropriation of the of landlord estates, the Tsarist government was no more inclined to work with the Second Duma than it was with the First Duma. The Tsarist government therefore prorogued the Second Duma in the same fashion as the First Duma. The

26 second Duma sat for only three and a half months, from February 2- to June 3, 1907, of its scheduled five-year term. At that point, the Tsarist government by decree amended the Fundamental Laws to engineer elections even more in favor of the landlord class and the conservative Octobrists. And assured of no future political threat to landlord ownership or a mitigated form of Tsarist authoritarian rule, the Third and Fourth Dumas were allowed to sit out their terms, the Third Duma from November 1907 to June 1912, and the Fourth Duma from 1912 to 1917, until Tsarist political rule itself was abolished by the new appearance of Soviets. The Bolsheviks and National Self-Determination: The Bolsheviks continued to use parliamentary immunity for agitational purposes to incite the proletariat and the peasantry against Tsarist rule. However, in addition to the economic issues addressing the proletariat and the peasantry, Lenin also espoused the cause of national self-determination to appeal to another political ally against Tsarist political rule. With 67 different ethnic or national groups in the 170 million population of the Tsarist Empire, and with only 75 million being of Great Russian extraction but constituting the power structure of political rule and ceaselessly committed to the “Russification” of non-Great Russian minorities, Lenin saw the value of supporting national self-determination of non-Great Russian populations, including the right to political independence, to recruit them as political allies in the revolutionary struggle against Tsarist rule. This position Lenin most popularly espoused in his work, On the Right of Nations to National-Self-Determination, written in 1914. But it is important to note that Lenin also explicitly declared the issue of national self-determination should always be approached from a Marxist political standpoint, that is, not on its own individual merit as a moral value but on its instrumental merit in advancing Marxist political revolutionary goals. The issue of national self-determination would become an ever more important component of Lenin’s Marxist revolutionary strategy when identified with the outbreak of World War I.

World War I and Leninist Political Goals

The Outbreak of War and Response of the Second International: On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand as heir to the Austro-Hungarian Crown was assassinated by a member of the terrorist Serbian “Black Hand,” while on a state visit to Herzegovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Serbian Black Hand was committed to expanding Serbian government influence over the Slavic populations in the southwestern Balkans, what today would be Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania.

Austria-Hungary was encouraged by Germany, her ally and foreign policy leader, to take a strong hand in retaliation by taken over the entire investigation and trial of the crime within Serbia. Russia, as Serbia’s principal ally in contending with Austria-Hungary for political influence in the southwestern Balkans, backed Serbia’s refusal to accept the demands of the Austro-Hungarian government as a threat to her national sovereignty. Austria-Hungary responded with a military invasion of Serbia, and Russia responded by declaring war on Austria-Hungary; Germany then declared war on Russia in defense of her Central Alliance ally Austria Hungary, and Great Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany and Austria-Hungary in defense of their Triple Entente ally Russia. Hence, by the beginning of August 1914, within a matter of six weeks, all Europe was in the throes of World War I. The Response of the Second International: The Marxist Social-Democratic Parties of the Second International were slow in responding to the outbreak of the war, especially on the basis of the policies set forth by the Stuttgart Resolution in 1907. By the time that the Marxist Social-Democratic Parties of the warring countries met at Zimmerwald, Switzerland from September 5-8, 1915, it had already split into three different groups.

A group of the Zimmerwald “right,” headed by Georgii Plekhanov in Russia (now Lenin’s rival) and David Schiedemann in Germany, openly called for support of a war of legitimate national defense of their own countries. Such a position fell completely short of the Stuttgart Resolution of 1907.

A second majority group of the Zimmerwald “center,” headed by Julius Martov in Russia and Karl Kautsky in Germany, more in line with the Stuttgart Resolution of 1907, condemned the entire war as an aggressive act by capitalist imperialist governments to expand their colonial holdings at the expense of one another. But at the same time, contrary to the Stuttgart Resolution of 1907, argued that whatever the imperialist nature of the war the

27 workers of all warring countries had the right to defend themselves against a warring enemy, as opposed to calling for an immediate overthrow of their own warring imperialist governments. The Zimmerwald center argued that the best that Marxist Social-Democratic Parties could do was to try to re-establish world peace through a call to call all warring imperialist governments to accept an “immediate peace without annexations and without indemnities.”

And a third minority group of the Zimmerwald “left,” headed by V.I. Lenin in Russia and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, called for all truly revolutionary Marxist Social-Democratic Parties to take advantage of the an international working-class outrage of against the internecine slaughter of their fellow working-class brothers to engage an immediate socialist overthrow of their imperialist capitalist governments as the only answer to world peace. In a work entitled “Socialism and War,” written in July-August 1915 in anticipation of the Zimmerwald Congress, Lenin argued that acceptance of any support of national defense of imperialist governments constituted “social chauvinism” as a wartime for form of “political opportunism” as a failure to support Marxist socialist-communist political revolutionary goals. Instead of supporting any form of “defense of the fatherland” the slogan of revolutionary Marxist must be “turn the international imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war.”

The Wartime Departure in Leninist Revolutionary Theory: As leader of the Zimmerwald center, Karl Kautsky was also recognized as one of the principal Marxist theorists of the Second International. And, in contradistinction to Lenin, Kautsky, in calling for a European-wide policy of “peace without annexations and without indemnities,” envisioned a postwar stage of capitalist imperialist cooperation in which the all capitalist imperialist governments would act together as an international consortium of capitalist investment in third-world countries until all countries, including former third-world countries, would be ready for a world-wide socialist revolution. Kautsky referred to such a postwar stage of imperialism as “ultra-imperialism,” even leading to a political “United States of Europe.” In response, Lenin wrote in 1915 wrote a strident critique of Kautsky’s prospect for an ultra-imperialist stage of all-European political cooperation in a polemic entitled “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe.” Lenin argued that such an ultra-imperialist cooperation was impossible due to the “uneven development of capitalism.” As different capitalist continue to grow a different rates in the organic composition of capital in industrial development, they will continue to have competing needs for the expansion of their colonial holdings in an ongoing quest for a competitive political-military “re-division of the colonies.” For example, he cites the change in comparative in pig-iron production in Great Britain and Germany. In 1892, Great Britain produced 6,800,000 tons of pig iron and Germany 4,900,000 tons of pig iron; but in 1912 Germany produced 17,600,000 tons of pig iron as compared to 9,000,000 tons of pig iron produced in Great Britain. By the same token, Great Britain as an early-comer in imperialism held 9.3 million square miles of colonial territory while Germany as a late-comer held only 1 million square miles of colonial territory. Hence, the quest of Germany for a redivision of the world’s colonial holdings by military might. In this, Lenin quotes the class dictum of the Prussian political theorist Karl von Clausewitz in declaring that “war is the extension of politics by other means.” The question then became: What class elements were prepared to overthrow capitalist imperialist rule in the warring nations, and what type of foreign policy would such revolutionary class elements follow after seizing power? Lenin answered that in Russia the revolutionary class elements must be the proletariat and the poor peasantry, arguing that the rich peasantry in support of their capitalist allies, the Octobrists and Constitutional Democrats, had committed themselves to the support of the war. This meant that a revolutionary alliance to support the democratic revolution in Russia must now be solely composed of the proletariat and the poor peasantry, and this in turn meant that the democratic revolution in Russia in Russia must be aimed straight away at the establishment of socialist rule. And Lenin concomitantly answered that the foreign policy of such a government of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry must be aimed against all imperialist powers for the universal liberation of all the colonies of the world. Only then could it be a true war of national defense as opposed to a war of colonial expansion, as would be the case if Russia remained aligned with Great Britain and France, despite Russia’s own war aims. Since Russia was ill-prepared for the war, and was barely holding its own on the eastern front, and was suffering from great military disaffection with the eventual loss of 1,500,000 military lives, the idea that Russia alone could conduct a successful war against all the warring imperialist countries was totally impracticable. But Lenin reasoned

28 that once a socialist-communist Russian government committed itself to such an endeavor it would prompt the working-classes of the warring imperialist countries to overthrow their own imperialist governments, lest they be conducting an imperialist war of their national class enemies against a socialist government of their international class brothers in Russia. The upshot would then be a world-wide socialist-communist revolution.

Political Unrest in Russia Leading to the October Revolution

The Overthrow of Tsarist Rule: In early 1917, the Russian population was in an angry mood of protest stemming from wartime shortages bordering on mass malnutrition, government mandated draconian labor laws, the demands of universal conscription, especially on the peasantry comprising 80% of the population which still harbored a disdain for the landlord class and a quest for “black redistribution.” The unrest was intensified by the lack of any immediate prospect of military victory, and the scandal of the influence of the defrocked monk, Ivan Rasputin, at the Russian court until his assassination in January 1917. The Tsar himself had left the court under the guidance of the Tsarina Alexandra when he left to establish his presence at the military front in 1916. The price of bread rose steeply in February 1917, and a strike broke out at the Putilov Locomotive Works in Petrograd (the name Saint Petersburg was changed to Petrograd in 1914 against any German identity) that employed some 40,000 workers. When management refused to cede the workers’ demand for a 50% increase in wages. The workers responded with a sit-down strike and management retaliated with a factory lock-out on February 22, 1917 (O.S.). Sympathy workers’ strikes then followed from February 23 to February 26, 1917 (O.S.) in which some 200,000 workers left their jobs. By the Sunday of February 26th, huge crowds began to march through the streets of Petrograd against general hunger and the handling of the wartime economy. Soldiers were ordered to fire on the crowds, but joined the crowds when they refused to disperse. Informed that the political situation was out of hand, the Tsar immediately boarded his private train for Petrograd. Fearing that the return of the Tsar would mean its own dissolution and the rule of Tsarist martial law, the Duma responded on March 1, 1917 (O.S.) by declaring itself to be the only authority of a new Provisional Government with Georgii Lvov, a Constitutional Democrat, as the Chairman of a Duma constituted Council of Ministers. The Tsar, intercepted en route to Petrograd in his private train, was forced to abdicate and abrogate Tsarist rule as such on March 2, 1917 (O.S.) Nicholas had wanted to abdicate in favor of a relative. The Establishment of Soviets and the Provisional Governments: Even before a new Provisional Government was declared by the Duma, new Soviets were constituted on February 27, 1917 (O.S.), in the same fashion as the self-acting bodies of armed men as characterized by Lenin in the Russian Revolution In 1917, the Soviets were even more expansively established throughout the cities and countryside of Russia; and, in 1917, the Soviet were also organized in the military, under an elected Central Executive Authority of an All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Deputies. Soviet authority in the military included the power to countermand any orders in conflict with the foreign policy determination of the Central Executive Authority of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants, and Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Deputies. The Soviets were determined that any new government would not discriminate against equal voting rights for the workers and peasants, as opposed to the electoral law of 1907, and to secure trade-union reforms and black redistribution of the land. In this, the Soviets were determined that Russia would establish a thorough-going democratic republic without reverting to any form of constitutional monarchy which the Octobrists still advocated.

At the outset, the Soviets were dominated by a Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary majority with only 10% of their membership being Bolsheviks. Likewise, at the outset, the Soviets were prepared to allow a Provisional Government established on March 1, 1917, and constituted almost exclusively from non-socialist Duma members and referred to as the First Provisional Government, to assume formal authority in Russia under the promise of calling for a Constituent Assembly to draw up a new form of constitutional government and take action on the issue of land reform. The Soviets, in turn, despite Bolshevik opposition, assented to the declaration of the Provisional Revolutionary Government that Russia would continue to continue the war “to a victorious conclusion” within the framework of the resolution of the Zimmerwald center of Julius Martov to aim at “a peace without annexations

29 and without indemnities.” Only a moderate socialist of the Trudovik persuasion, Alexander Kerensky, was allowed to join the First Provisional Government as its Minister of Justice mostly to keep a Soviet eye on its policies.

The First Provisional Government under Georgii Lvov, experienced a shake-up in May 1917 when it was revealed that Russia was to annex Constantinople, Galicia, and Armenia under a 1916 agreement with its Entente allies, Great Britain and France. When the contents of this agreement became known, Paul Miliukov, a Constitutional Democrat, was forced to resign as Foreign Minister and Alexander Guchkov, an Octobrist, as War Minister. Alexander Kerensky replaced Guchkov as War Minister and the Provisional Government brought in an additional several members of the Soviets in a new “coalition government” of members of the Provisional Government and the All-Russian Executive of the Soviets. From late May on, Kerensky in fact became the dominant political figure in the coalition government and in July of 1917 it was reorganized with Kerensky as Chairman of the Council of Ministers with a majority membership from the Soviets. The reorganized coalition government of July 1917 came to be called the Second Provisional Government.

Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolutionary Strategy

Lenin’s Return and Revolutionary Strategy: As a condition for its initial support of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the Soviets demanded an amnesty for all former Tsarist political opponents and the universal right of freedom of expression and political association. Lenin had been living in political exile in Switzerland since the 1905 revolution. The German government guaranteed Lenin’s return to Petrograd in a sealed railroad car through German military lines, knowing that he advocated the complete rejection of Russian Entente military participation in the war, which would free up all German troops from an eastern front. Upon his arrival in Petrograd on April 3, 1917 (O.S.), Lenin immediately set about to publish his program for Bolshevik political strategy in his April Thesis, published in Pravda (the Bolshevik party newspaper organ since 1912) on April 7, 1917 (O.S.). The April Theses as the basis of Lenin’s successful revolutionary political strategy throughout the changing events of 1917 called for the following:

(1) All Power to the Soviets: In April of 1917, the Provisional Government was constituted almost exclusively

of Constitutional Democrats and Octobrists. The Mensheviks at the time followed the pattern of their 1905 strategy in calling for “action only from below,” that is, to support the bourgeois democratic capitalist class as the primary political force to overthrow Tsarist rule in constituting the membership of the First Provisional Government. The Mensheviks argued, as in 1905, that, since from the standpoint of orthodox Marxist economics, the capitalist class was destined for a lengthy period of political rule to develop the forces of production under capitalist economic exploitation, it was not for the proletariat and the poor peasantry to head a provisional government historically destined to rule over their own economic exploitation.

In contrast, Lenin, as in 1905, Lenin called for “action from above” in the 1905 bourgeois democratic revolution, in which Bolshevik led elements of the proletariat and the peasantry must themselves seize power in a provisional revolutionary government (a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”). Lenin’s argument was that only the proletariat and the poor peasantry by the nature of their majority class essence could be committed to establishing thorough-going democratic rule in a democratic republic. The bourgeois capitalist class, on the other hand, by the nature of its minority class essence would always collaborate with some form of authoritarian rule as a form of Tsarist autocracy to protect its minority class rule. Hence, the bourgeois capitalist rule of the First Provisional Government must itself be ousted from political power by the direct and complete rule of the Soviets in the call for: “All Power to the Soviets.” Otherwise, Lenin argued that the First Provisional Government would be able to turn counterrevolutionary and eventually re-establish a form of authoritarian government as did the Tsarist government in the 1905 Russian Revolution under the “Fundamental Laws” it adopted in 1906.

To support his argument, Lenin cited the proclamation of the First Provisional Government that it would postpone convoking a constituent assembly until after war. Likewise, it declared that any land

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reform program must wait until a new government could be constituted under a constituent assembly, meeting after the war.

(2) The Establishment of a Commune-Type of State: An underlying theme of Lenin’s April Theses was that

the Soviets in Russia in 1917, as in 1905, were “self-acting bodies of armed men” organized from the bottom up to a centralized national rule in an All-Russian Executive Committee under an All-Russian Congress of Soviets. As such, Lenin argued that the Soviets were a government of truly constituted democratic self-rule superseding the typical organizational structure of parliamentary governments in western Europe, in which a highly paid professional bureaucracy of the police and military gendarmed an exploited working class and poor peasantry in the interest of a bourgeois capitalist class. In this, Lenin said that the Russian Soviets were acting in the fashion as Marx had said that the Paris Commune of 1871 had “smashed” the old bureaucratic state machinery of capitalist rule, and must be seen as the political model for future socialist rule.

What Lenin was therefore saying was that the establishment of Soviet rule in Russia was correlatively identified with the establishment of socialist rule in representing the organizational structure of the rule of the economic class majority of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. In 1915 Lenin had already identified the 1905 Soviets as “organs of revolutionary power,” and had added that in order to break with any imperialist wartime identity they would have to be organs to the socialist rule of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. But he had not explicitly proclaimed the organizational structure of the Soviets to be one of a correlative socialist identity.

(3) Uninterrupted Revolution: Lenin expanded on this argument that the Soviets represented both the

completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia insofar as they still represented the proletariat and the peasantry as a whole, that is, the rich peasantry as well as the poor peasantry. This was evidenced in its support for the imperialist war and its failure to take any steps toward the economic introduction of socialism. Here, Lenin called for the immediate nationalization of the banking and financial system, which he argued, given the wartime planning already instituted in Russia in the “syndicalization” of the sugar, oil, coal, and iron and steel industries, already representing the “threshold” of socialist state planning, would leading to “democratic planning” under proletarian-poor peasant rule and would constitute “a step toward socialism.”

In Hegelian language the Lenin saw the Soviets in constituting a unity of opposites as twofold aspects as organs of revolutionary power. On the one hand, they represented the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution while still within the framework of a class majority that included capitalist big peasantry; but, on the other hand, the Soviets were destined to become the framework of a higher historically advanced class majority of the proletariat and the poor peasantry in socialist political rule. As such, Lenin’s position dovetailed with his strategy in Two Tactics treated above.

(4) Splitting the Poor Peasantry from the Rich Peasantry: To move straight-away to a socialist revolution

required splitting the peasantry from the rich peasantry, whereby the Soviets would become organs of revolutionary power of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. And here Lenin called for the agitational slogan of the Populist movement: “land to the tillers,” that is, the immediate expropriation of the landlord estates. Lenin reasoned that the poor peasantry would immediately leave their arms at the front. This would undermine the war effort of the Provisional Government, which Lenin still claimed to be an imperialist war insofar as Russia was fighting as allies of Great Britain and France as imperialist powers, while driving the poor peasantry against the rich peasantry who, as capitalists, were still prepared to support the war, and place a hold on land on reform in the name of a universal nationalist cause of the defense of the fatherland.

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(5) Securing a Majority in the Soviets: Lenin repeatedly insisted that the Bolsheviks could not come to power until they gained a majority in the Soviets: to do so would be to call for a “Blanquist coup,” which would be an attempt to hold power with a political minority that would be doomed to failure. And, at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets which met on June 16, 1917, the Bolsheviks held only 105 deputies of the 822 deputies, while the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries held 248 delegates and 285 delegates respectively. Lenin argued that the Bolsheviks would simply have to bide their time with continued revolutionary agitation until the tide of revolutionary events moved decisively in the Bolshevik direction.

The Revolutionary Course to October

The Second Galician Offensive: As complete head of the Second Provisional Government, Kerensky undertook a second Galician offensive under General Alexis Brusilov as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in July of 1917, as a successor to a first Galician offensive undertaken by Brusilov in 1916, to shore up national support for the Second Provisional Government and the war. However, like the Galician offensive of the previous year, it ended in failure. After initial military successes, the Austro-Hungarian forces, shored by German army units drove the Russian forces back to their original lines with heavy loses. Dissent in the military where Soviet authority had to approve all regular military order continued to grow along with the Bolshevik condemnation of the entire war. Membership in the Bolshevik Party grew from 80,000 in April 1917 to 240,000 in August 1917. The July Days: Disaffection over what was seen as continuing futile attempts to win the war by offensive action led to a massive military march by soldiers and the sailors of the Baltic fleet in Petrograd in the “July Days” (July 3-5, 1917 O.S.). The soldiers and sailors showed a Bolshevik inclination against both the Provisional Government and its Menshevik-Socialist-Revolutionary majority from the Soviets. Some argue that Lenin could have seized power right then and there. But Lenin, still not sure that such an action would be supported by a majority support in the Soviets throughout the country, demurred. And when the demonstrations of the July Days died out, Kerensky accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of attempting to incite the demonstrations in an overthrow of the government and the war effort, and accused the leaders of the Bolshevik Party of being “German agents” and charged them with espionage. Lenin himself was forced into hiding in Finland for the next two months. The Kornilov Attempt Coup: But Kerensky’s own power and that of the Soviets came to threatened by the right. On July 31, 1917 (O.S.), Kerensky replaced Brusilov by General Lavr Kornilov as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. An authoritarian military figure, Kornilov immediately dismissed all Soviet control over the armed forces and by September 7, 1917, declared himself to be the supreme head of the Provisional Government displacing Kerensky and Soviet power over the Provisional Government. Kornilov then began a march on Petrograd to disperse an armed Bolshevik “Red Guard” of 25,000 members which had been organized by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky upon his return to Russia in July of that year had joined the Bolshevik Marxists in opposition to the Mensheviks, and immediately assumed a position on the Bolshevik Party Central Committee. Under the circumstances, Kerensky had no choice but to rescind his campaign against the Bolsheviks and call upon their support as the only armed force in their Red Guard with the power to repel Kornilov and retain his authority and Soviet power in the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government itself was reorganized on October 8, 1917, in a 10-member Council of Ministers composed only of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, excluding all Octobrists and Constitutional Democrats. The Red Guard successfully resisted Kornilov’s attempted military coup, with his own military forces deserting his campaign in fraternizing with Petrograd workers supporting Soviet power. Kornilov himself was captured but eventually escaped from captivity on November 6, 1917 (O.S.) to again take up his political opposition as one of the first leaders of a White Guard; however, he was eventually killed in the Soviet civil war on April 3, 1918 by Bolshevik forces.

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The Bolshevik Decision to Seize Power: Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd Soviet and Moscow Soviet respectively on September 13, 1917 (O.S,) and September 18, 1917 (O.S.) With Lenin back in Saint Petersburg on October 7,1917, (O.S.) the Bolshevik Central Committee was now prepared seize to seize power through the political-military support of the Petrograd worker-class, the Petrograd Red Guard, and the “Red Sailors” of the Krondstadt naval garrison stationed off the shore of Petrograd. This was the decision of a majority of the members of the Central Committee that included Lenin, Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, among others. Only Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev dissented. They argued that taking power must await the approval of the upcoming Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets scheduled to meet on October 26, 1917 (O.S.). Kamenev and Zinoviev argued that pending the outcome of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a coalition government with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries might be necessary—a possibility which Lenin himself had posed in September, but which, with a Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets Lenin now rejected in favor of a total Bolshevik seizure of political power. The date of the Bolshevik seizure of power was set for October 25, 1917 (O.S.).

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Questions for Reflection

(1) What concessions did the Tsarist government gain from the Manchu dynasty in the right to establish the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian Railways in 1896 and 1898? What annexations did the Japanese government gain from China under the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) following its victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895? Control over what area of the decaying Manchus dynasty then became the basis of conflict leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905?

(2) What action did the Japanese naval forces take that led to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War of

1904-1905? What military action by Japanese land forces then immediately followed? What was the fate of the Russian Baltic Sea fleet when it entered the Tsushima Straits between the southern tip of Korea and Japan? What then were the terms of the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 under the Treaty of Portsmouth signed on September 5, 1905 (O.S.)?

(3) Peasant unrest swept the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1905 in what type of action for what

type of agricultural goal? What was Tsar finally forced to concede to the popular masses in his October Manifesto issued on October 17, 1905 (O.S.)? How was this declaration compromised by the nature of the Fundamental Laws which were adopted prior to the calling of the First Duma on April 27, 1906 (O.S.)? What was the organizational nature of the Soviets which began to appear on October 26, 1905 in opposition to Tsarist autocratic rule? What type of revolutionary action did Lenin call for the Soviets to take under a Bolshevik program of “action from above” as opposed to the program of “action only from below” as called for by the Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution of 1905?

(4) Within the framework of “action from above,” what did Lenin hope to realize in the form of “uninterrupted revolution,” given his early characterization of the Russian proletariat and poor peasantry? What did Peter Stolypin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Second Duma do on January 7, 1917 (O.S.) to appease the peasantry after the Social Revolutionary Party entered into a new of revolutionary terror in 1906-1907? What did Stolypin hope to accomplish in Russia agriculture by what he called “placing a wager on the strong”? How, in turn, did Stolypin did with the terrorist activities of the “combat organization” of the Social Revolutionary Party under the heading of “Stolypin’ necktie”?

(5) How did Lenin see calling for the right of national self-determination for all non-Great Russian nationalities in the Russian empire as contributing to the Marxist political revolutionary movement? What position did Lenin take on Russia’s role in World War I as an ally of Great Britain and France? What by way of contrast did Lenin call for a true commitment to the Marxist political revolutionary movement? What did Lenin then call for under the heading of national self-determination to justify any basis of carrying on the war in the name of a legitimate form of national defense? How did Lenin, by citing the “uneven development of capitalism,” critique Karl Kautsky’s notion of “ultra-imperialism” as a peaceful stage of imperialist development transcending on-going war?

(6) In calling for “all power to the Soviets” in his April Theses on April 7, 1907 (O.S.) how did Lenin argue that the Soviets as “self-acting bodies of armed men” were the organizational structure of socialist rule? Why did Lenin call for the immediate ouster of the First Provisional Government, headed by the Constitutional Democrats, even though, the Bolsheviks did not yet command a majority in the Soviets? What political strategy did Lenin then call for to split off the poor peasantry from the rich peasantry, regarding land reform and continuation in the war on the side of Great Britain and France, to immediately transform the bourgeois-democratic phase into the socialist phase of the 1917 Russian Revolution in its Soviet organization? How did the failure of the Brusilov offensive contribute to an increase in the Bolshevik membership from 80,000 in April 1917 to 240,000 in August

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1917? What, then, happened in the “July Days” of 1917? What, then, also happened in the Kornilov Affair of September 1917? What, then, became the Bolshevik political status in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets respectively on September 13, 1917 (O.S.) and September 18, 1917 (O.S.) that led Lenin to decide to seize power in conjunction with the Red Guard, the Red Krondstadt Sailors, and the Petrograd workers on October 25, 1917?