The October Revolution: the First Successful Proletarian Revolution

To celebrate the 106th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, we will go over a brief history of the party behind it and how it led the masses in seizing state power. This will be based on our book.

Brief History of the Revolution

The Bolsheviks were the revolutionary faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was founded in 1898. Stalin elucidates the party’s history in his book, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. In the first chapter, he writes this (our emphasis):

In 1895 Lenin united all the Marxist workers’ circles in St. Petersburg (there were already about twenty of them) into a single League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.

Lenin put before the League of Struggle the task of forming closer connections with the mass working-class movement and of giving it political leadership. Lenin proposed to pass from the propaganda of Marxism among the few politically advanced workers who gathered in the propaganda circles to political agitation among the broad masses of the working class on issues of the day. This turn towards mass agitation was of profound importance for the subsequent development of the working-class movement in Russia. …

In 1898 several of the Leagues of Struggle—those of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav—together with the Bund made the first attempt to unite and form a Social-Democratic party. For this purpose they summoned the First Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which was held in Minsk in March 1898. …

But although the First Congress had been held, in reality no Marxist Social-Democratic Party was as yet formed in Russia. The congress did not succeed in uniting the separate Marxist circles and organizations and welding them together organizationally. There was still no common line of action in the work of the local organizations, nor was there a party program, party rules or a single leading center.

[Source]

Lenin led a struggle against opportunists in his struggle to found a workers’ party in Russia. Marxists had to refute all sorts of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organizations’ “theories” and practices, and even many “Marxists” capitulated to the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords with their opportunism. Most important of these was the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, which Stalin writes on in Chapter Two. He shows how they opposed proletarian dictatorship; despised the vanguard party’s role in agitating, educating, organizing, and leading the masses; opposed proletarian action overall, calling for capitulation to the bourgeoisie; and held other revisionist views that were unacceptable to the proletariat:

The most important item on the agenda was the adoption of the Party program. The chief point which, during the discussion of the program, aroused the objections of the opportunist section of the congress was the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There were a number of other items in the program on which the opportunists did not agree with the revolutionary section of the congress. But they decided to put up the main fight on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the plea that the programs of a number of foreign Social-Democratic parties contained no clause on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that therefore the program of the Russian Social-Democratic Party could dispense with it too. …

The adoption of the program had gone through comparatively smoothly, but fierce disputes arose at the congress over the Party Rules. The sharpest differences arose over the formulation of the first paragraph of the rules, dealing with Party membership. Who could be a member of the Party, what was to be the composition of the Party, what was to be the organizational nature of the Party, an organized whole or something amorphous?—such were the questions that arose in connection with the first paragraph of the rules. Two different formulations contested the ground: Lenin’s formulation, which was supported by Plekhanov and the firm Iskra-ists; and Martov’s formulation, which was supported by Axelrod, Zasulich, the unstable Iskra-ists, Trotsky, and all the avowed opportunists at the congress. …

Summing up his analysis of the differences, and defining the position of the Mensheviks as “opportunism in matters of organization,” Lenin considered that one of the gravest sins of Menshevism lay in its underestimation of the importance of party organization as a weapon of the proletariat in the struggle for its emancipation. The Mensheviks held that the party organization of the proletariat was of no great importance for the victory of the revolution. Contrary to the Mensheviks, Lenin held that the ideological unity of the proletariat alone was not enough for victory; if victory was to be won, ideological unity would have to be “consolidated “ by the “material unity of organization “ of the proletariat. Only on this condition, Lenin considered, could the proletariat become an invincible force. 

[Source]

In early 1905, the working class of Saint Petersburg (the capital of the Russian Empire) started strikes due to the unemployment of their fellow workers and because they realized bourgeois-democratic rights, such as “freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of association for the workers, the convocation of a Constituent Assembly for the purpose of changing the political system of Russia, equality of all before the law, separation of church from the state, termination of the war, an 8-hour working day, and the handing over of the land to the peasants” were necessary [Source]. While their spontaneous energy got them to support petitions, the Bolsheviks told them that only revolution could secure those rights; even though their strikes and protests were unarmed, the Tsarist autocracy murdered them in cold blood, proving the Bolsheviks’ point. Thus began the 1905 bourgeois revolution, a movement with Bolshevik leadership and the participation of other “socialist” and liberal parties.

Workers’ strikes, peasants’ uprisings, soldiers’ and sailors’ mutinies, national movements, anti-war protests (against the ongoing Russo-Japanese war that was going poorly for Russia), and other disruptions of Tsarist society characterized 1905’s attempt at a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Non-Bolshevik elements took these struggles in bad directions, but the masses fought hard and sacrificed their lives, radicalizing more and more of the people. The Bolsheviks became more popular, and this concerned the feudal state and the liberal bourgeoisie. The latter did want “democracy” of some sort, but they had no interest in joining the revolution because they benefited from Russia’s military-feudal imperialism; they also did not need any liberation of nations in the empire since they were predominantly Russian and benefited from the exploitation of other nations as well as their own workers and peasants. That is why they supported some “democratic” reforms like forming a parliament, and it is also why it supported provocations of pogroms and massacres of ethnicities.

When the Tsar proposed creating a “parliament” (the Duma, which the Tsar basically had control over), the Mensheviks attempted to work with this “legislature” while the Bolsheviks boycotted it. The Mensheviks supported the bourgeois line of reforming the Tsarist state; the Bolsheviks only sought to use elections to prove their uselessness and to support armed struggle. As Lenin explains in Chapter Four (“The Struggle Against Which Enemies Within the Working-Class Movement Helped Bolshevism Develop, Gain Strength, and Become Steeled”) of “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, this was a correct action to take:

When, in August 1905, the tsar proclaimed the convocation of a consultative “parliament”, the Bolsheviks called for its boycott, in the teeth of all the opposition parties and the Mensheviks, and the “parliament” was in fact swept away by the revolution of October 1905. The boycott proved correct at the time, not because nonparticipation in reactionary parliaments is correct in general, but because we accurately appraised the objective situation, which was leading to the rapid development of the mass strikes first into a political strike, then into a revolutionary strike, and finally into an uprising. Moreover, the struggle centered at that time on the question of whether the convocation of the first representative assembly should be left to the tsar, or an attempt should be made to wrest its convocation from the old regime.

[Source]

Eventually, the revolution ended after an attempted armed uprising in many Russian cities and in oppressed nations’ territories was crushed. Mensheviks tried to support reformist capitulation with that failure, but the Bolsheviks continued their work of preparing for revolution. That work became really effective in the years before World War One, when the Russian imperialists clearly prepared for war while the masses sought an improvement of their conditions and not a war that would cause further suffering.

Russia’s imperialist ambitions required the expenditure of workers and peasants as they were recruited to fight fellow workers and peasants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The use of troops from oppressed nations also caused disloyalty among them, and the war effort caused shortages of basic materials and goods for civilians and soldiers alike. On top of that, in the face of revisionists’ social-chauvinism (socialism in name, chauvinism in deeds), the Bolsheviks maintained their position of anti-imperialism and self-determination for all oppressed nations; they also supported land reform for peasants, proletarian seizure of industry, and putting political power in soviets of workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ deputies.

Following protests from women and striking workers, the February Revolution (March 8–16, 1917; February 23 to March 3 in the Julian Calendar, the calendar of old Russia) commenced, and the bourgeoisie seized power, ending the Tsar’s absolute monarchy; this was the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia. This provisional government’s parliament was controlled by the “Socialist-Revolutionaries” and various liberal parties, and the Mensheviks also got involved in elections. The Bolsheviks remained radical and did not participate in the capitalist state; instead, they worked to develop dual power via the Petrograd Soviet and other soviets. While the proletariat and peasantry were not the ruling class yet, they were able to set up soviets, and in these soviets the Bolsheviks became leaders. This began the construction of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

The new bourgeois republic failed to withdraw Russia from World War One. It also failed to meaningfully democratize Russia, and it refused to give self-determination to oppressed nations. Because they failed to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and because of the development of proletarian and peasant power, the Bolsheviks were able to execute the October Revolution (November 7th–13th, 1917, or October 25th–31st in the Julian Calendar), the socialist revolution in Russia. The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) was the first Marxist and Leninist country, but it was not Marxist-Leninist; Marxism-Leninism was only synthesized in the late-1920s. The RSFSR was founded in 1917, after the October Revolution. Vladimir Lenin became the head of its government, and the workers held real political power for the first time since the Paris Commune.

The Revolution’s Outcomes

When the Bolsheviks seized power from the bourgeois “provisional government” and replaced it with the Petrograd Soviet, real democracy began its development. Anti-communists and pseudo-socialist opportunists alike slander the Bolsheviks for “destroying democracy” and “imposing a party dictatorship”, but in reality, the revolution empowered the masses in a way not seen anywhere across the world ever since class society developed. While the masses wanted peace, the old provisional state continued the imperialist war while the Bolsheviks carried out measures that could bring peace to the land; true, the civil war raged on instead, but the blame for it goes to the White Army, the reactionary Tsarists and provisional state soldiers that refused to accept proletarian power. When the workers sought to improve their wages while the lower and middle peasants wanted more land from the kulaks, the bourgeois government and their Tsarist allies did little to help them (and the Tsarists sought to return to feudalism), but the Soviet government distributed land and empowered the working people economically.

As Chapter 4 of Article 1 of the Constitution of the RSFSR said, “The Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies believes that now, during the progress of the decisive battle between the proletariat and its exploiters, the exploiters should not hold a position in any branch of the Soviet Government. The power must belong entirely to the toiling masses and to their plenipotentiary representatives—the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies” [Source]. All laboring people had the right to vote for representatives in soviets, while former and existing exploiters were deprived of this right. This is why the Bolsheviks eliminated the power of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties, and it is why they maintained “one-party rule”, as the one workers’ party of Russia. Meanwhile, oppressed national territories in the former Russian Empire were granted independence thanks to the proletariat’s victory, giving freedom to Finland, Poland, etc.

Nonetheless, there were numerous challenges to Soviet power, and it had to fight brutally from its beginning. During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks dealt with not just the Russian Empire/Republic remnants (the White Army), but also its allied countries (the Allied Powers of World War 1: Japan, the UK, US, and other allies and colonies), 27 anti-communist national separatist movements (many of which were given the freedom to secede from the Bolsheviks, only for them to fight the Red Army anyway), the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and their collaborators, until 1918, when they lost World War 1), and various “socialist” (opportunist) groups that fought the Bolsheviks (Mensheviks, “Left Socialist-Revolutionaries”, anarchists, and the “Green Army”). Because of these rival forces, the new proletarian state, the RSFSR, created a proletarian state, with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and the Cheka. The young Soviet republic faced many terrible conditions and very brutal conflict, making these workers’ state bodies more necessary. Despite all of the contradictions and all of the odds against them, the Soviet state survived, albeit at a great cost.

A lot of violence had occurred prior to and during the October Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War. After the February Revolution, state repression, peasant rebellions, urban riots, anarchist attacks, and more all committed horrendous acts of violence, including torture, against others (even civilians)! Only with the Bolshevik seizure of power and the formation of a proletarian dictatorship did order and stability come back and peace spread across the land after the civil war. In Chapter Three of Stalin: the History and Critique of a Black Legend, it says:

The combination of these multiple contradictions causes a bloody state of anarchy with the “collapse of all authority and all administrative organization”, with an explosion of savage violence coming from below (in which millions of deserters or disbanded soldiers are the primary protagonists), and with a “militarization and an overall brutalization of social behavior and political practices”. It’s a “brutalization without possible means of comparison to that known in Western societies”. …

The oppression, exploitation and humiliation of an immense mass of peasantry by an exclusive, aristocratic elite, who considered themselves foreign in relation to their own people, considered a different and inferior race, were precursors to a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Especially because the social conflict became even more acute with the outbreak of World War I, in which the noble officers on a daily basis exercised a true power of life and death over peasant soldiers; it’s no coincidence that at the first signs of crisis they sought to maintain discipline on the front and in the rear by resorting to the use of artillery. The collapse of the old regime is the moment for revenge and vengeance, cultivated and sown over centuries. The prince G. E. Lvov self-critically recognizes this: ‘the vengeance of the peasant servants’ was a settling of accounts with those who for centuries had refused to “treat the peasants as people, rather than as dogs”. …

What caused this brutal violence? The policies carried out by the Bolsheviks? Only in part: in 1921 and 1922 ‘a terrible famine’ ravaged the countryside, ‘directly caused by a year of drought and freezing temperatures’. Yet the peasant revolt was also a protest against ‘a state that took their sons and horses to the army, that prolonged the devastation caused by the civil war, that forcibly conscripted peasants into work crews, that looted their food supplies’; this was also a protest against a catastrophe that began in 1914.

With respect to Bolshevik policies it’s necessary to know how to distinguish between measures that unreasonably struck against the peasantry, from those that had a completely different character. …

Once again, we see the extent of the violence that is unleashed in a Russia consumed by crisis. This is true as well for the horrific pogroms directed against Jews and Bolsheviks, the first especially, who are suspected of being behind the Bolsheviks, using them as puppets.

[Source]

Therefore, most of the violence the Soviet state engaged in was necessary, and anti-communists are dishonest for one-sidedly denouncing the Bolsheviks for their tactics while ignoring or even celebrating the tactics of reactionaries.

Because of this experience with revolution and many others, we, as revolutionary communists, see that we need to lead the people in a harsh struggle to smash the old state and build a new one, a proletarian machine that can eliminate enemies of the toilers. That is why we celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution, the first revolution of many that led to the construction of a lasting dictatorship of the proletariat.