The only problem was that the leaders of the councils did not dare to exercise the power themselves, but tried to impose the power to the bourgeois politicians of the Duma, who themselves resisting taking the reins in their hands, demanding the consent of the monarchy for this.

I did recently read a number of pages of this account searching for arguments for another discussion.

To be completely frank — and again with no disrespect intended to anyone — I find Lars Lih’s article above confusing, just as I found Paul LeBlanc’s most recent article, “Re-Arming the Party: Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolution in 1917,” confusing. (Please see my comments on that post.) Yet when I go back to the most basic source material by Lenin and Trotsky, any confusion disappears.

In my comments on Paul LeBlanc’s article I argued that what had changed between 1905 and 1917 was not the political approach of Lenin and the Bolsheviks (as expressed in “Two Tactics”) but the objective situation itself. Lenin pointed to the further development of the class struggle in Russia and the “great accelerator” of the imperialist war.

As I re-read Trotsky’s “Lessons of October,” I see the same point being made.

“The February revolution, if considered by itself, was a bourgeois revolution. But as a bourgeois revolution it came too late and was devoid of any stability…” wrote Trotsky.

“The fundamental controversial question around which everything else centered was this: whether or not we should struggle for power; whether or not we should assume power,” Trotsky continued.

Why was this question posed? For the same reasons that Lenin had enumerated:

1. The victory of the February Revolution and
2. The crisis created by the imperialist war

As Trotsky explained, “the outbreak of the war forged a new and gigantic link in the chain of developments….The war interrupted the unfolding revolutionary movement. It acted at first to retard but afterwards to accelerate it enormously.”

Trotsky then returns to the debates within the Bolshevik Party:

“This alone is ample proof that we were not then dealing with a mere episodic difference of opinion but with two tendencies of the utmost principled significance. The first and principal tendency was proletarian and led to the road of world revolution. The other was “democratic,” i.e., petty-bourgeois, and led, in the last analysis, to the subordination of proletarian policies to the requirements of bourgeois society in the process of reform.”

Two tendencies that we might recall emerged in public immediately prior to the October Revolution when Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed the seizure of power.

Trotsky then demonstrated his agreement with Lenin by quoting Lenin’s argument in April 1917 in “Letters on Tactics.” But before re-reading the words Trotsky calls our attention to, let’s make sure we all understand the context in which Lenin was speaking:

“What, then, is the first stage?” Lenin asked.

“It is the passing of state power to the bourgeoisie.

“Before the February-March revolution of 1917, state power in Russia was in the hands of one old class, namely, the feudal landed nobility, headed by Nicholas Romanov.

“After the revolution, the power is in the hands of a different class, a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie.

“The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.

“To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.

“But at this point we hear a clamour of protest from people who readily call themselves ‘old Bolsheviks.’ Didn’t we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed? Is it not a fact, on the contrary, that it has not even started?

“My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out diflerently; they are more original, more peculiar, more variated than anyone could have expected.”

Let’s return to Trotsky in “Lessons of October,” for just a moment. In the same Chapter Two cited above, Trotsky continues by citing Lenin’s refutations of the arguments of “Old Bolsheviks” concerning the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” who:

“…more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality … But one must measure up not to old formulas but to the new reality. Is this reality covered by Comrade Kamenev’s Old Bolshevik formula, which says that ‘the bourgeois democratic revolution is not completed’?

“It is not,” Lenin answers. “The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it.” [CW, (Moscow 1964), Vol.24, Letters on Tactics (April 8-13, 1917), pp.44-50]

Fortunately for the discussion that is taking place on these pages today, that is not all Lenin said on this subject in “Letters on Tactics.” Again his arguments are in such unmistakable language I am inclined to ask, “What is all the shouting about today?”

“‘The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,'” says Lenin, “has already become a reality in the Russian revolution, for this ‘formula’ envisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation, this co-operation. ‘The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’—there you have the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ already accomplished in reality.

“This formula is already antiquated. Events have moved it from [the] realm of formulas into the realm of reality, clothed it with flesh and bone, concretised it and thereby modified it.

“A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, ‘Communist’ elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists, who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of ‘supporting’ the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government).

“The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of ‘old Bolsheviks’).

“The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already been realised, but in a highly original manner, and with a number of extremely important modifications. I shall deal with them separately in one of my next letters. For the present, it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”

Here Lenin concludes by citing the words of Goethe’s Faust, that we are all, I am sure, familiar with.

“Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.”

To put it simply, Lenin and Trotsky agreed on the essential political dynamics of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Trotsky cited that same agreement in “Lessons of October,” in 1924.