When the Russian Revolution broke out in early 1917, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov – better known as Lenin – the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, was exiled in Zurich, Switzerland. As the first reports arrived of these extraordinary events, Lenin’s excitement was coupled with exasperation that he himself was separated from them by thousands of miles. “I am beside myself that I cannot go to Scandinavia!!” he complained bitterly, in a letter to his friend Inessa Armand. “I will not forgive myself for not risking the journey in 1915!

Immediately after hearing abou the revolution, Lenin resolved to return to Russia and play a part in the events to come. Over the next weeks followed urgent correspondences between Switzerland and other Bolshevik exiles and those running the Bolshevik centre in Petrograd, as Lenin prepared to join them. Even before his arrival on the scene he was providing analysis of the situation in the party newspaper Pravda (Letters from Afar) and outlining revolutionary tactics: “…the struggle against imperialism, as before revolutionary propaganda, agitation and struggle with the aim of an international proletarian revolution and the conquest of power by the ‘Soviets of Workers’ Deputies’ (and not the Cadet swindlers).”

In the final days of March, Lenin along with other Socialists in in Switzerland embarked on the dangerous journey to Scandinavia via war-torn Germany. As soon as he arrived at Petrograd’s Finland station on 3rd April, he gave a speech to his fellow Bolsheviks denouncing the provisional government and calling for international socialist revolution.

The party centre he found in Russia’s capital was completely at odds with the revolutionary vanguard which would lead the October insurrection little more than six months later.

Lenin wasted no time in taking his comrades to task, criticising the mechanistic approach of Kamenev to the ‘bourgeois revolution’ before reading his famous ‘April Theses’ on the tasks of the Russian proletariat the day after his arrival in Petrograd. Lenin alone among the Bolsheviks at that stage recognised that only the Russian working class had the potential to carry through the revolution.

On the basis of Lenin’s formulations, the Bolsheviks grew exponentially from being a tiny minority to winning the majority of the Soviets and leading the Revolution itself.

The April Theses were first announced in a speech in two meetings on 16 April 1917 (4 April according to the old Russian Calendar). They were subsequently published in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda. In the Theses, Lenin

  • Condemns the Provisional Government as bourgeois and urges “no support” for it, as “the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear”. He condemns World War I as a “predatory imperialist war” and the “revolutionary defensism” of foreign social democrat parties, calling for revolutionary defeatism.
  • Asserts that Russia is “passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”.
  • Recognises that the Bolsheviks are a minority in most of the soviets against a “block of all the petty-bourgeois opportunist elements, from the Social-Cadets and the Socialist Revolutionaries down to the Organising Committee (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, etc.), Steklov, etc., etc., who have yielded to the influence of the bourgeoisie and spread that influence among the proletariat”.
  • Calls for a parliamentary republic not to be established and calls this a “retrograde step”. He calls for “a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom”.
  • Calls for “abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy” and for “the salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker”.
  • Calls for “The weight of emphasis in the agrarian programme to be shifted to the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies”, “confiscation of all landed estates”, and “nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatines, according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.”
  • Calls for “the immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies”. States that “it is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies”.
  • Lists “party tasks” as “Immediate convocation of a party congress”, “alteration of the party programme, mainly: (1) On the question of imperialism and the imperialist war, (2) On our attitude towards the state and our demand for a ‘commune state’, amendment of our out-of-date minimum programme, and change of the Party’s name”. Lenin notes that “instead of ‘Social Democracy’, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the ‘defencists’ and the vacillating ‘Kautskyites’), we must call ourselves the Communist Party”. The name change would dissociate the Bolsheviks from the social democratic parties of Europe supporting participation of their nation in World War I. Lenin first developed this point in his 1915 pamphlet “Socialism and War”, when he first called the pro-war social-democrats “social chauvinists”.
  • Calls for a new “revolutionary International, an International against the social-chauvinists and against the ‘Center’”. This later became the Communist International (Third International) which was formed in 1919.

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