The thrust of Lenin’s ninety-minute speech was that the transition from the “bourgeois-democratic” to the “socialist” revolution had to be accomplished in a matter of months.* This meant that barely four weeks after tsarism had been overthrown, Lenin was publicly sentencing its successor to death. This proposition ran so contrary to the sentiments of the majority of his followers, it seemed so irresponsible and “adventurist,” that the remainder of the night, until the meeting broke up at 4 a.m., was spent in tempestuous debate.
Later that day Lenin read to a group of Bolsheviks and then separately to a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks a paper which, anticipating resistance, he presented as reflecting his personal opinions. Subsequently known as the “April Theses,” it outlined a program of action that must have appeared to his audiences as totally out of touch with reality if not positively mad.36 He proposed no backing for the ongoing war; immediate transition to the “second” phase of the revolution; refusal to support the Provisional Government; transfer of all power to the Soviets; abolition of the army in favor of a popular militia; confiscation of all landlord property and nationalization of all land; the fusion of all banks into a single National Bank under Soviet supervision; Soviet control of production and distribution; creation of a new Socialist International.
Pravda’s editorial board refused to print Lenin’s “Theses” on the pretext of a mechanical breakdown at its printing plant.37 A meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on April 6 passed a negative resolution on them. Kamenev insisted that Lenin’s analogy between the situation in contemporary Russia and the Paris Commune was faulty, while Stalin found the “Theses” “schematic” and short on facts.38 But Lenin and Zinoviev, who had in the meantime joined the editorial board of Pravda, forced the issue, and the “Theses” appeared on April 7. Lenin’s article was accompanied by an editorial comment by Kamenev which disassociated the party’s organ from it. Lenin, Kamenev wrote,
proceeds from the premise that the bourgeois-democratic revolution has been completed and counts on the immediate transformation of that revolution into a socialist one.
But, he went on, the Central Committee thought otherwise and the Bolshevik Party would be guided by its resolutions.* The Petrograd Committee met on April 8 to discuss Lenin’s paper. Its verdict was also overwhelmingly negative, two voting in favor, thirteen against, with one abstention.39 The reaction in the provincial cities was similar: the Bolshevik organizations in Kiev and Saratov, for instance, rejected Lenin’s program, the latter on the grounds that the author was out of touch with the situation in Russia.40
Whatever the Bolsheviks’ opinion of their leader’s pronouncements, the Germans were delighted. On April 4/17, their agent in Stockholm cabled to Berlin: “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we wish.”41
Lenin was a very secretive man: although he spoke and wrote voluminously, enough to fill fifty-five volumes of collected works, his speeches and writings are overwhelmingly propaganda and agitation, meant to persuade potential followers and destroy known opponents rather than reveal his thoughts. He rarely disclosed what was on his mind, even to close associates. As supreme commander in the global war between classes, he kept his plans private. To reconstruct his thinking, it is necessary, therefore, to proceed retroactively, from known deeds to concealed intentions.
On general issues—who the enemy was and what was to be done to him—Lenin was frank enough. The objective—the “program”—broadly defined, he made public; it was the tactics that he kept hidden. And herein lies the difficulty of divining Lenin’s intentions. For as Mussolini, himself no mean expert in the art of the coup d’état, confided to Giovanni Giolitti, “a State has to be defended not against a program of the revolution but against its tactics.”42
Lenin rejected the Menshevik-SR doctrine of a two-stage revolution and its corollary, dvoevlastie or dyarchy; he meant to topple the Provisional Government as soon as practicable and seize power. His remarkably keen political instinct—the flair possessed by every successful general—told him this could be done. He knew the liberal and socialist intelligentsia for what they were: “vegetarian tigers,” to borrow a phrase from Clemenceau, who for all their revolutionary cant were deathly afraid of political responsibility and incapable of exercising it even if handed to them. In this respect, he judged them like Nicholas II. He further realized that underneath the appearance of national unity and universal support of the Provisional Government there seethed powerful destructive forces which, fanned and properly directed, could bring down the ineffective democracy and carry him to power: shortages of goods in the cities, agrarian unrest, ethnic aspirations. To accomplish their objective, the Bolsheviks had to set themselves clearly apart from both the Provisional Government and the other socialist parties as the sole alternative to the status quo. In line with this reasoning, after returning to Russia, Lenin compelled his followers to abandon the conciliatory attitude toward the Provisional Government and any thought of merging with the Mensheviks.
In view of the immense popularity of democratic slogans, Lenin could not openly claim power on behalf of the Bolshevik Party: no one outside Bolshevik ranks, and very few within them, would have found this prospect acceptable. For this reason, with one brief interlude, throughout 1917 he called for power to be transferred to the soviets. This tactic may appear puzzling in view of the fact that until the fall of 1917 the Bolsheviks were a minority in the soviets, so that, on the face of it, the implementation of this program would have transferred power to the Mensheviks and SRs. But the Bolsheviks felt confident the latter would not stand in their way. Tsereteli, who of all the Menshevik leaders had the fewest illusions about their rivals, wrote that the Bolsheviks believed they would have little trouble wresting national power from the soviet majority.43 From Lenin’s point of view the Provisional Government, for all its incompetence, was a more dangerous enemy than the democratic socialists because it had at its disposal a large armed force and because it enjoyed a certain measure of support from the peasantry and the middle class: by appealing to nationalism it could rally powerful forces against him. As long as the Provisional Government stayed in power, however nominally, the danger always existed of the country veering to the right. With the soviet as the locus of authority, it was a relatively simple matter to keep on radicalizing the political atmosphere and pulling the irresolute socialists along by frightening them with the specter of a “counterrevolution.”
Lenin pursued his objective—seizure of power—in a manner that was rooted in the study of military history and military science. Genuine politics, even in its authoritarian form, entails some sort of accommodation both with other contenders for power and with the population at large, which leaves the governed scope for free initiative. But Lenin, for whom politics was always class war, thought in Clausewitzian terms: its purpose, as that of military strategy, was not accommodation with the opponent but his destruction. This meant, first and foremost, disarming him, in two senses: (1) depriving him of an armed force and (2) smashing his institutions. But it could also mean his physical annihilation, as on the field of battle. European socialists routinely talked of “class war,” but they meant by it a struggle waged mainly with non-violent means, such as industrial strikes and the ballot box, which might, at a certain point, culminate in barricades. Lenin and he alone understood “class war” in the literal sense to mean civil war—warfare with every available weapon for the purpose of strategic destruction and, if need be, extermination of rivals that left the victor with unchallenged mastery of the political battlefield. Revolution in this view was war waged by other means, the difference being that the combatants were not states and nations but social classes: its battle lines ran vertically rather than horizontally. In this militarization of politics lay a critical source of Lenin’s success, for those whom he designated as enemies could not conceive of anyone seriously treating politics as combat in which quarter was neither given nor expected.