Was the return of Vladimir Lenin and several other exiled Bolshevik leaders in 1917 decisive to the development of the Russian Revolution?

Viewpoint: Yes. Without Lenin the Bolsheviks had no reasonable chance of imposing their particular structure on the revolutionary process.

Viewpoint: No. The Russian Revolution was well on its course before Lenin's return.

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In early 1917 the German High Command agreed to transport three dozen exiled Russian revolutionaries from Switzerland across Germany to the newly renamed Petrograd. The purpose of the exercise was to foment revolution in Russia and thereby achieve through politics what for two and a half years had proven impossible militarily: drive Russia out of a war Germany was a long way from winning.
The Germans were well aware of the risks they ran--so much so that Vladimir Lenin's insistence that the train be given extraterritorial rights on its passage through Germany, with no one entering or leaving it, has been processed into legend as an external "sealing" to prevent contagion by the plague of revolution. Yet, how decisive was the presence of Lenin and his associates in the final process of replacing the tsar's government with a Bolshevik one? Revolution had been well under way before Lenin's famous arrival at the Finland Station. The Provisional Government formed in March 1916 had been able to do little about the problems generated and exacerbated by eighteen months of war. The erosion of Russian infrastructure had continued, with everything from the railway system to local administrations either gridlocking or dissolving. Allied pressure to launch new offensives canceled the benefits, material and moral, that the new government received from its democratic orientation. Well before the government established committees to consider soldiers' grievances, military discipline at the front and in the rear became symbolic as fewer superiors risked giving orders that might be challenged or ignored.
Opposition to the Provisional Government was, however, as diffuse as it was powerful. The various parties and factions supporting revolution had long histories of mutual enmity, personal and ideological. Those with a Marxist base found their situation further complicated by Karl Marx's insistence that a bourgeois revolution based on a developed capitalist system was a necessary precondition for the final triumph of Communism. It required a good deal of exegesis and even more logic chopping to argue that these conditions had been fulfilled in the Russia of 1917.
Lenin had argued before the war that Russia under the right circumstances could omit the bourgeois-democratic revolution and proceed directly to a dictatorship of the proletariat supported by its natural ally, the peasantry. From the first days of his return, Lenin's clarity of vision and his ruthless determination galvanized the still-small Bolshevik movement, attracted supporters, and inhibited rivals. As the grip of the Provisional Government slackened and Russia slid toward chaos, someone who was that sure of himself reassured others as well. The Bolshevik coup of November 1917 was remarkable not for its immediate success--by that time power was almost literally lying in the streets--but for the subsequent lack of resistance, from any quarter: a circumstance that endured for the first crucial weeks the Bolsheviks consolidated their position and began steering Russia down Lenin's path.



Viewpoint: Yes. Without Lenin the Bolsheviks had no reasonable chance of imposing their particular structure on the revolutionary process.

When the Imperial German government allowed a trainload of exiled Russian radicals to cross its territory and return home in the spring of 1917, it condemned Russia to a firestorm of revolution and civil conflict that outlived World War I by many years. Although the Germans intended the repatriation of Vladimir Lenin and several other Bolshevik leaders to benefit the position of Germany in the war by provoking domestic strife in Russia, they unleashed forces with long-range consequences that they failed to comprehend. Without Lenin's decisive and fanatical leadership at a critical time in 1917, the Bolshevik Party could never have entertained serious pretensions to national leadership.

One of the critical problems that had beset the Bolshevik Party was that its radical Marxist leadership, uncompromising in its devotion to communist revolution, had long been a special target for the tsarist authorities. Lenin, its undisputed leader, had been jailed for helping found a revolutionary political organization in 1895 and was then exiled to Siberia in 1897. When his sentence expired in 1900, he left Russia and spent the next seventeen years in various West European cosmopolitan centers, where he cultivated his position as the leader of the Bolshevik Party and supported himself by "borrowing" party funds and living off the income of his mother's estate. The revolutionary careers of many other Bolshevik leaders and lesser party members paralleled Lenin's. Many of them spent years abroad to escape the consequences of their subversive activities in Russia and lost touch with the political realities in the country. At the same time, other prominent Bolsheviks remained in Russia. A handful even sat in the protoparliamentary Duma (representative council) after an initial boycott of its elections. Yet, these Bolsheviks also had their problems. Roman Malinovsky, the most prominent domestic Bolshevik leader and probably the second most important leader in the party after Lenin, turned out to be a tsarist police informer. Several other prominent Bolshevik agitators, most of whom had also spent at least some time abroad, were apprehended and sentenced to prison terms or Siberian exile.

Despite the respect that Lenin commanded and his unchallenged leadership, the Bolshevik Party was diffuse, disorganized, and unpopular in the first months of 1917. Before the collapse of tsarism in March, none of the Bolshevik leaders--or most other radicals for that matter--predicted that a communist revolution would be a real possibility in the foreseeable future. In January 1917, only a few weeks before the popular disturbances in Petrograd brought down the monarchy, Lenin himself told an audience that the older generation of the socialist movement (in which he included himself, at age forty-six) might not live to see the revolution. Within Russia, the Bolshevik Party had one tortured newspaper (Pravda), subject to constant police surveillance and censorship, and only a few thousand active members.

The collapse of tsarism offered a partial solution for this organizational problem. Shortly after the weak Provisional Government assumed power, it issued a full amnesty for political offenders against the Old Regime. Exiled and imprisoned revolutionary leaders were free to return to the political centers of European Russia without restrictions and regardless of the nature of their crimes, provided, of course, that they could travel there. For the scattered Bolsheviks, this amnesty meant that they could now assemble openly in Petrograd and work for the vision of a communist future. Political freedom, however, did not by itself promise to consolidate the Bolshevik Party or enable it to mount a serious campaign for national leadership. In the first weeks of democratic revolution in Russia, during February-March 1917, the now openly operating Bolshevik Party organization in Petrograd was timid in its approach to revolution. Under the editorial leadership of Lev Kamenev and Iosif Dzhugashvili (a young revolutionary known by his party alias, Stalin), who had returned from Siberian exile under the amnesty, Pravda declared its unreserved solidarity with the Provisional Government and support for its authority.

In a classically Marxist sense this stand was the correct policy to follow. Marx and his major disciples had predicted that a socialist revolution would follow from a pseudoscientific historical process that moved through progressive stages of social and economic development. In this dialectic process, a successful socialist revolution could only develop within a "bourgeois" society dominated by a fully industrialized, capitalist economy. Since Russia in 1917 was still an overwhelmingly rural nation just emerging from autocratic rule, strict Marxists believed that it had only just begun to enter the necessary capitalist stage of development. Their propensity to collapse political events into theoretical categorizations led them to believe that the Provisional Government represented this essential "bourgeois democratic phase" of development. Even though the Bolsheviks were the most radical political party, their domestic leadership's decision to support the Provisional Government was in step with both Marxist theory and with the attitudes of the comparatively less radical Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary Parties. Socialist revolution was their shared ultimate goal, but they all believed that it could only happen after a prolonged period of industrialization and economic development.

After the German government facilitated Lenin's return in April 1917, however, the Bolsheviks changed their tune. Despite the content of Marx's teaching on the importance of the "bourgeois democratic" revolutions for the natural progression toward communism, Lenin immediately made clear that he had no time for the Provisional Government. Seeing the political crisis around him, Lenin developed an opportunistic variant of Marxist philosophy that called for immediate revolutionary action. Conscientious Bolsheviks, he proclaimed, should work to "force the hand of history." Lenin believed that through diligence and discipline they could effectively bypass the capitalist stage of development and work to build communism in the here and now rather than in some remote future. Immediately upon Lenin's arrival in Petrograd, he elaborated his "April Theses," a radical political platform calling for the replacement of the Provisional Government by the working-class Soviet institution and the radical transformation of the Russian economy and society along strictly Marxist lines.

Naturally, Lenin was working on a weak theoretical basis, even for a Marxist. The only basis he could find in Marx's writings was a cryptic passage in a letter to a Russian Populist revolutionary, in which Marx said that revolution in underdeveloped Russia could be possible if it were quickly followed by a worldwide revolution that then supplied Russia with massive material aid. This battle cry was hardly inspiring, but Lenin believed it, and that was all that mattered. By the force of his personality, he was without challenge within the Bolshevik Party. The structure of the party complemented his strong leadership position, for its founding principle--which separated it from the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic movement--was its adherence to a tightly organized and hierarchical structure of authority. Through this "democratic centralism" the party leadership exercised total authority over its lower echelons and rank and file, which were bound to obey its decisions or risk disciplinary action. When Lenin decided to pursue an activist revolutionary program in April 1917, he was out of step with more doctrinaire Marxists, including those among the Bolsheviks, but the nature of the organizational structure prevented anyone from contradicting him. Without his decisive personal leadership and immediate presence in the Russian capital, the Bolsheviks were unlikely ever to have followed the surprisingly militant course that Lenin demanded upon his return.

In the months that followed, Lenin's determination became an important factor in the fortunes of the now militant Bolshevik Party. The Provisional Government proved itself to be a consistently indecisive executive authority. By its own words it was only supposed to be a temporary regime that would hold power until a democratically elected Constituent Assembly decided the political future of Russia. It also absolved itself of responsibility for most pressing political and economic issues, which were also relegated to the future government. Unable to instill public confidence or even preserve law and order in many ways, the Provisional Government created mass disillusionment. Lenin's call for radical change presented an alternative. Although the Bolsheviks never inspired anything close to a majority of public support, even among Russians inclined toward socialism, Lenin was able to differentiate his party from the more timid socialists willing to work with the Provisional Government. By remaining in perpetual opposition, the Bolsheviks avoided any association with the failures and weaknesses of the government. Instead, the determination of the party gave it a broad reputation for revolutionary vigilance. Even if most socialists disagreed with the Bolsheviks and opposed many of their policies, they nevertheless believed--fatally as it turned out--that Lenin's party was committed to the defense of the revolution. This image was enhanced by the pronounced role played by armed Bolshevik factory workers, the so-called Red Guards, in resisting suspicious troop movements ordered by the army commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov, in August 1917. Sharing their history of underground activity and police trouble, moreover, most socialists looked on the Bolsheviks as comrades in arms who could be trusted to work honestly and effectively for the good of the working class. It never occurred to them that their "misguided brothers" would soon pursue a one-party dictatorship based on terror and coercion, and the Bolshevik leaders cultivated their image as defenders of democracy up to and even during the October coup. Without Lenin's decisive leadership and overwhelming presence, the Bolshevik Party could never have achieved this "special" status and would have probably remained a fringe socialist party with marginal public support and no serious pretensions to government.

Lenin's most decisive moments came in September and October 1917, when it became clear that the authority of the Provisional Government was slipping away. As confidence in the government plummeted, it was widely rumored that its prime minister, Aleksandr Kerensky, or elements within the military, or both in combination, would attempt a counterrevolutionary coup. Lenin saw these rumors, which had little foundation in fact despite Kornilov's machinations, as a critical advantage in his own plot to take power. Arguing that the time had come for the Bolsheviks to depose the government, Lenin used the force of his personality and unchallengeable leadership to compel the Central Committee of the party to approve plans for a revolutionary coup. Lenin's presence was essential for its decision. In the critical weeks leading up to the uprising, he had to defuse substantial intraparty opposition to secure adherence to the plan. If he were still trying to direct revolutionary activity from cafés in Switzerland, his task would have been infinitely more difficult, if not impossible.

When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government on 25 October 1917, their entire effort was the result of Lenin's leadership. Some historians, and the Bolsheviks themselves, later argued that the events of October 1917 were inevitably caused by the social and economic crises in Russia and that the Russian people made a conscious "choice" for communism. This analysis ignores Lenin's crucial role in shaping events. His presence in Russia, facilitated by the German government, led directly to the Bolshevik turnabout in April 1917 and its consequent advocacy of radical revolutionary transformation. As a result of this change, the Bolsheviks were sharply distinguished from the other socialist parties, which supported the ineffectual Provisional Government and lost their prestige as its fortunes declined. Lenin's important personal role was also decisive in October 1917, when he forcefully committed the party to the coup d'état that brought it to power. Without him that critical decision likely would never have been made, and the seminal event in the radicalization of the Russian Revolution would never have taken place.

-- Paul Du Quenoy, Georgetown University


Viewpoint: No. The Russian Revolution was well on its course before Lenin's return.

While Vladimir Lenin played a pivotal role in the final results of the Russian Revolution, his return in April was only one of many factors that led to the fall of the Provisional Government and the rise of the Soviets. The February Revolution was the result of a mass uprising triggered primarily by hunger and frustration with World War I. The institution of the Provisional Government did not solve these fundamental problems, and dissatisfaction with its policies mounted throughout 1917 regardless of the political stance of the leadership in the Petrograd Soviet.

The tsarist Duma reconstituted itself as the Provisional Government and took control over the country after the Tsar abdicated. This government had been elected by a small portion of the population and could not claim to represent the wishes of the Russian people. Still, these men were, by and large, highly educated liberals who wanted Russia to have a parliamentary system that would protect individual rights and freedoms. They believed in private property, education, and democracy--at least in theory. They also tended to be from the upper classes and believed that it was their duty to guide the largely uneducated Russian populace onto the right path. In addition, they understood the responsibility that their government had to its allies and the territorial claims that it could make after the war was won if it continued to fight.

Taking all these perfectly reasonable factors into consideration, the leaders of the Provisional Government were concerned that a popular election might not institute the right kind of government--they might, for example, end up with a group of populists who would succumb to mass pressure to abandon the allies and lose the territory that Russia stood to gain by staying in the war. A new government might also violate the sacred right to private property and give peasants land, distribute food among the poor, and basically destroy any hope Russia had for a western-style bourgeois democracy. For these reasons, the Provisional Government kept delaying the Constituent Assembly, apparently hoping to get through the war before making any radical changes in government. The government immediately granted wide-ranging civil rights to the population, paving the way for open and active agitation and demonstrations against its policies. It is clear that these men deeply believed in liberal government and truly wanted to do what they thought was best for Russia. It is equally clear, however, that they did not trust the Russian people to govern themselves, nor did they understand how much the Russians deplored their continuing participation in the war. In order to contain the situation, this unpopular government needed to make concessions to public sentiment or forbid free criticism of its policies. By doing neither, it set the stage for further rebellion.

The fact that the Russians continued to lose the war did not help the Provisional Government. Problems at the front had little to do with politics; they had more to do with morale, supplies, and the mass desertions that took place before each military engagement--most notably, during the Galician campaign. As the soldiers "voted with their feet" and left the front, the Russian forces continued to lose every major battle. Returning soldiers told horrific stories of draconian discipline and huge numbers of casualties. They returned to impoverished cities and a chaotic countryside, where peasants had begun to seize land from nobles and gentry and redraw the property lines of Russia without permission from the government. Tensions were high in both town and country. The Provisional Government continued to promise future elections and imminent victory, but as bad news poured in from the front, fewer and fewer people believed the assurances of the leadership. The widespread hatred of the Provisional Government and its policies grew steadily, simply because the government refused to accede to the overwhelming desire of the Russian public to get out of the war or to deal with the complex problem of peasant landholdings. The longer the Provisional Government refused to acknowledge the importance of these issues, the angrier and more violent the people grew.

Meanwhile, the Provisional Government became increasingly unpopular with the conservative factions and with the army. The government simply looked inept--it was losing the war, the cities kept erupting into chaos, and peasants were "reclaiming" land all over the countryside. Not surprisingly, criticism started to emerge from those groups who feared that the revolution was not yet over and wanted the Provisional Government to maintain order at home and give the army more support at the front. General Lavr Kornilov's attempted coup in August did not happen in a vacuum--everyone on the Right was concerned that the government would lose control entirely and that another revolution would result in exactly the kind of popular radical leadership that the Provisional Government was trying to prevent by postponing the Constituent Assembly. These factions urged the government to crack down, to censor the press, and to arrest anyone who spoke out against state policy. While the government moved against some of the more radical and outspoken Bolsheviks, the leaders did not want the Provisional Government to become a dictatorship and so refused to implement the harsh, repressive measures that the Right demanded. By the end of the summer, the Provisional Government had managed to alienate virtually everyone in the country. Kornilov's attempted coup shows that in addition to the possibility of a popular revolt, the government was also in danger of losing power to the military.

Lenin's return in April certainly turned the tide of the revolution for the tiny Bolshevik faction of the Petrograd Soviet. He insisted that the Bolsheviks withdraw support from the Provisional Government and pursue the ultimate goal of the workers' revolution immediately, rather than waiting for the slow development of capitalism. The Bolsheviks, however, constituted only a small part of the Petrograd Soviet, which was dominated by moderate socialists who favored sticking to the historical time line outlined by Karl Marx and anticipated a long wait for capitalism to develop in Russia before a workers' revolution could occur. Not until the end of August did the Bolsheviks win a majority in the Soviet, which they eventually attained because they reflected the growing desires of the Russian people to get out of the war and to distribute land to the peasants and food to the cities. Their slogan "Bread, Peace and Land" did not create those desires--it capitalized on the already existing mood of the country. The Bolsheviks simply rode the wave of the popular revolutionary spirit, which was made abundantly clear during the July Days, when the people of Petrograd took to the streets, rioting in favor of Soviet power. While the workers demanded that the Soviet take over the Provisional Government, moderate members of the Soviet tried to explain to the workers that the moment for the workers' revolution had not arrived--they had to allow the bourgeois revolution to run its course. The mobs did not find this argument compelling. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, hid or tried to calm down the rioters--they were not ready for the Soviet to take over since it was still controlled by moderate socialists rather than Bolsheviks; revolution was at hand, according to Lenin, but just not quite yet. The rioters did not find this line of reasoning satisfying either, but finally dispersed after three days. Clearly, the revolution had plenty of momentum even without the Bolsheviks or Lenin to guide it.

The Provisional Government was doomed to fail as long as it insisted on ignoring the wishes of the Russian people--and there is no indication that the leadership ever seriously considered getting out of the war or dealing with the issues of bread and land. Its paternalistic attitude toward the Russian people infuriated a population that was already hungry and war weary. The people became increasingly radical and revolutionary, and this sentiment played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, who managed to manipulate the coming revolution to their own ends; the movement toward a second revolution against the Provisional Government, however, had little to do with Lenin's return.

-- Greta Bucher, U.S. Military Academy


A FRENCH AMBASSADOR ON LENIN

French diplomat Georges Maurice Paléologue, in his memoirs, recalls the resilience and power of Vladimir Lenin during the initial days of the Russian Revolution:

Saturday, April 21, 1917.

When Miliukov assured me that Lenin had been hopelessly discredited in the eyes of the Soviet by the extravagance of his "defeatism," he was once more the victim of an optimistic illusion.

On the contrary, Lenin's influence seems to have been increasing greatly in the last few days. One point of which there can be no doubt is that he has already gathered round him, or under his orders, all the hot-heads of the revolution; he is now established as a strong leader.

Born on the 23rd April, 1870, at Simbirsk on the Volga, Vladimir Flitch Ulianov, known as Lenin, is a pure Russian. His father, who belonged to the provincial petite noblesse, was employed in the department of education. In 1887 his eldest brother, implicated in a plot against Alexander III, was condemned to death and hung. This tragedy determined the whole course of life of young Vladimir Flitch, who was finishing his education at Kazan University: he threw himself heart and soul into the revolutionary movement. The destruction of tsarism was thereafter an obsession with him, and the gospel of Karl Marx became his breviary. In January, 1897, the police, who were keeping an eye on him, exiled him for three years to Minuschinsk, on the Upper Jenissei, near the Mongolian frontier. On the expiration of his sentence, he was permitted to leave Russia and he made his home in Switzerland, from which he frequently visited Paris. Tireless in his activities, he soon formed an enthusiastic sect which he fired with the cult of international Marxism. During the seditious disorders of 1905 he thought for a moment that his hour had come, and secretly returned to Russia. But the crisis passed; it was only a prelude, the first stirring of popular passions, and he went back into exile.

Lenin, utopian dreamer and fanatic, prophet and metaphysician, blind to any idea of the impossible or the absurd, a stranger to all feelings of justice or mercy, violent, machiavellian and crazy with vanity, places at the service of his messianic visions a strong unemotional will, pitiless logic and amazing powers of persuasion and command. Judging by the reports I have received of his first speeches, he is insisting on the revolutionary dictatorship of the working and rural masses; he is preaching that the proletariat has no country and proclaiming his longing for the defeat of the Russian armies. When anyone attacks his crude fancies with some argument drawn from the realm of reality, he replies with the gorgeous phrase: "So much the worse for reality!" Thus it is mere waste of time to endeavour to convince him that if the Russian armies are destroyed, Russia will become helpless prey in the claws of the German conqueror who, after gorging himself on her, will abandon her to the convulsions of anarchy. The man is all the more dangerous because he is said to be pure-minded, temperate and ascetic. Such as I see him in my mind's eye, he is a compound of Savanarola and Marat, Blanqui and Bakunin.

Source: Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador's Memoirs, volume 3, translated by F. A. Holt (New York: Doran, 1925), pp. 303-305.

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FURTHER READINGS


References


Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, 3 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1950-1953).

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879-1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Viking, 1997).

Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990).

Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1959).

Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking, 1973).

Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, translated by Harold Shukman (New York: Free Press, 1994).

Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).