Passing through Germany left Lenin and the Bolsheviks open to the Compromisers’ vitriol that they were “German agents,” but the crisis in the party and fear a revolutionary moment might be wasted outweighed this threat. Leon Trotsky was a leader of the Russian revolution in 1917 and is the author of My Life, The History of the Russian Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed. I hope it not only provides a useful summary of the. His parents were Jewish farmers. The lockout not only made the workers favorable to the demand for the control of industry, but even pushed them toward the thought of the necessity of taking the factories into the hands of the state.”. Miliukov’s candid exposure of Russia’s ambitions inspired an immediate and red-hot response. Within the soviet, the Compromisers grew furious over the affront to their power. THE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Leon Trotsky - This is the outstanding Marxist work on the Russian revolution. Although not yet overstepping the bounds of bourgeois democracy, the Bolsheviks acted, or strove to act—however confused by their leadership—like uncompromising revolutionists. Class collaboration under the auspices of building a new revolutionary state was boldly promoted by Russia’s chief “socialist” parties: the Mensheviks, who dominated the urban working class and petty bourgeoisie, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who thought themselves the representatives of Russia’s peasants. But these same slogans were repeated again and again. While reasserting his own leading role (he became president of the Petrograd Soviet in August and led the October insurrection), Trotsky, who was not to join the Bolsheviks until July of 1917, gives the greatest responsibility for the success of the Bolsheviks to Lenin. Lenin argued. Trotsky brilliantly captures the tension between the formal leadership in the party center and the party’s broad layer of cadre leading in the streets and localities. Unbeknownst to the thousands of workers and soldiers who sent delegates to the soviet, members of the Soviet Executive Committee approached the Provisional Committee on March 1 and pressed it to take governmental power into its hands. In confrontations through the day forty protestors were shot. The Bolsheviks took the lead in arresting the tsarist officials; the Mensheviks opposed ‘excesses.’ The Bolsheviks energetically undertook the creation of a workers’ militia; the Mensheviks delayed the arming of the workers, not wishing to quarrel with the bourgeoisie. But Tseretelli was not only right. The Bolsheviks, to be sure, were asserting that the government wanted the war prolonged for the sake of robberies. In other words, we were preparing the October Revolution while thinking we were preparing the February.”. The April Theses that summarized Lenin’s new approach to Russia’s revolution retheorized the activity of the party, giving greater confidence and cohesion to its cadres, which would immediately allow the party the flexibility to navigate the crisis that exploded in April. Trotsky describes the scene as the soviet delegates viewed the march: The first Bolshevik slogans were met half-laughingly—Tseretelli had so confidently thrown down his challenge the day before. While many things changed over the months of revolution, these parties stayed true to their chosen allies: the Mensheviks clung at any cost to their liberal bourgeois allies, and the Bolsheviks drew closer to the peasantry through revolutionary action. Dozens of histories of the Russian Revolution have been written; what makes Trotsky’s History unique is its uncompromisingly working-class, Marxist account of the totality of the process, made all the more tangible from the point of view of a participant. At the first mass meeting soldiers sent their representatives, who were. Outside one of Petrograd’s largest factories a confrontation seemed imminent when Cossacks met advancing strikers: Decisive moment! account can in no way be seen as a substitute for reading Trotsky's Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The offensive had not lead to peace but war. An overwhelming majority of the workers, Menshevik, Social Revolutionary and non-party, supported the Bolsheviks at the moment of direct grapple with tsarism. With the cover provided by the moderate socialist parties, an offensive war for empire was transformed into revolutionary self-defense. Beyond the analytical incisiveness of the History, it is a work of great emotion and poetry, and Trotsky’s success at communicating the sweep of the revolution is often achieved through the tiniest detail depicting the psychological transformation of the masses. However, I hope it will allow readers who are unable to The slogan that united the bourgeoisie with the revolutionary masses was “defense”: defense of revolutionary Russia, defense of the revolution. Trotsky writes: A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries…. It is necessary only to understand that role correctly, taking personality as a link in the historic chain. This blog, updated for the 100th anniversary in 2017, is a summary of the outstanding "History of the Russian Revolution" written by one of its leaders, Leon Trotsky. While in the metal industry, especially in Petrograd, a layer of hereditary proletarians was crystallised out, having made a complete break with the country, in the Urals the prevailing type was half-proletarian, half-peasant. This episode has received much attention from both fawning Stalinists and right-wing critics who seek to paint Lenin as the iron hand driving the party. That is the essence of 1917. The futility of the war was obvious; desertions and disobedience began early as soldiers lacked not only guns but also shoes. With the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin became the leader of the new Soviet government and Trotsky became second only to Lenin. The pressure of both the military offensive at the front and a bosses’ offensive of lockouts in the cities fueled continuous activity in response. Unfortunately for the rulers of Russia, they also imported the class struggle that is an essential component of capitalism. The active and militant minority inevitable puts forward under fire from the enemy its more revolutionary and self-sacrificing elements. He waged Russia's 1917 revolution alongside Vladimir Lenin. The demand “All Power to the Soviets” rang out in demonstrations, newspapers, shop committees, soldiers’ committees, and land committees. The so-called leader and master of the Russian Empire had an outlook that “was not broader than that of a minor police official—with this difference, that the latter would have a better knowledge of reality and be less burdened with superstitions.” Most damning are the tsar’s diaries, which chronicle the most tedious banalities of his daily life while Russia convulses. But his is not the Lenin of Stalinist myth. But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers…the Cossacks, without openly breaking discipline, failed to force the crowd to disperse, but flowed through it in streams…. The following day 25,000–30,000 armed soldiers and workers registered their disagreement. Lenin’s new formulation came like a thunderclap in a chapel. This however, was not enough, Trotsky argues, to eradicate the revolutionary traditions and lessons carried by worker militants. But the marchers did not themselves enter Tauride Palace to rule a new Russia—the thousands of leaders who produced the revolution returned to the working-class districts and barracks, leaving the halls of power to be occupied by party heads and professional politicians who positioned themselves on the side of the uprising. The weather was fine…. The Death Agony of the Monarchy 7. The first volume is dedicated to the political history of February Revolution and the second to that of October Revolution, with the intention of explaining the relations between these two events. A wink, a hesitation, the trembling but defiant voice of a soldiers’ deputy in the Soviet embodied the growing boldness of an oppressed class rising to its feet against its oppressors. The delegates stopped counting the uncomfortable totals. The working class leapt from conditions of peasant livelihood directly into the collective urban experience, which included “sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with the past. What became the first day of the February Revolution didn’t appear to anyone to be of any historic importance. Trotsky gives a brilliant analysis of the instability of the competing authorities: The political mechanism of revolution consists of the transfer of power from one class to another. 4) 1905-1917: Downturn and Revival, War and Revolu... 5) The February Revolution: February 23rd – 27th 1917. However, the aims of the Mensheviks and the reality of the life of the Soviet diverged immediately. The memory of the movement of 1905 blazed bright in the minds of the oppressed, and they rushed to build local soviets. The sharpness of the reply is explained by the mood of betrayal: “It had been assumed that, up above, everything was being done to bring peace. Trotsky writes, “The war itself, its victims, its horror, its shame, brought not only the old, but also the new layers of workers into conflict with the tsarist regime. The fifth day ended with the collapse of the military’s obedience, the tsar’s abdication, and a mass march to Tauride Palace, which became the new center of power. As Trotsky writes in the Preface to the History: "During the first two months of 1917 Russia was still a Romanov monarchy. It is just this fact—combined with the concentrated oppressions of tsarism—that made the Russian workers hospitable to the boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought—just as the backward industries were hospitable to the last word in capitalist organization.” Despite their numerically small proportion—about 10 percent of the population in 1917—the working class held an economic and social position that meant they could lead the peasant majority in overthrowing capitalism in Russia, but could only be successful as part of an international wave of revolts. Trotsky’s personal involvement in no way inhibits his scientific view. It would have been necessary to employ force against them. Ibid., 125. The oppressed will come to us because the war will bring them to us. The Soviet Executive Committee, which wholly supported the offensive, feared this position would cement their isolation from the masses. All the parties were caught unawares; the Bolsheviks initially argued against the Women’s Day strikes. He make big impact in Russian history. They also viewed the peasants, whose historic struggle for land could break out into mighty flashes of struggle against the landlords and agricultural capitalists, as the workers’ natural ally against the tsar. At the end of February, the insurrection. This blog contains a summary of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky does argue that Lenin played a decisive role in this and later events of the revolution. This By early November, Trotsky had all but sacked the capital city. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Trotskyism. In the chapter “Shifts in the Masses” Trotsky assesses the course of 1917: A revolution teaches and teaches fast. His comrades of years were shocked, calling him an anarchist, and declaring he had been away too long. As a leading Bolshevik, Olminsky, said “We (at least many of us) were unconsciously steering a course toward proletarian revolution, although thinking we were steering a course toward a bourgeois-democratic revolution. We do not want the masses to believe us just on our say-so…. The April demonstrations were the first outbreak of resistance that targeted the workers and soldier’s “own” leaders. They therefore brought the issue before the full Congress of Soviets, then meeting in Petrograd, which approved it. Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution is a long, very complex, and extremely detailed treatment of the remarkably eventful period from February to October of 1917. We can then answer definitely enough: Conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin. In that lies its strength. That was one of the most moving scenes of the revolution, now first feeling its power, feeling the unnumbered masses it has aroused, the colossal tasks, the pride in success, the joyful failing of the heart at the thought of the morrow which is to be still more beautiful than today. In the early months of World War One the national rulers were able to defuse the class bitterness that had resurfaced in 1912 after years of repression. In the Bolshevik government, he was second only to Lenin and seemed destined to succeed him until Joseph Stalin outmaneuvered him politically and banished him from the Soviet Union. The vanguard of the class had drawn the conclusion that “individual economic strikes in the conditions of war, breakdown, and inflation could not bring a serious improvement, that there must be some change in the very foundation. The forcible overturn is usually accomplished in a brief time. The violent revolution marked the end of the Romanov dynasty and centuries of Russian Imperial rule. At the level of the shop floor, the worker-cadre fought Menshevism, but in the Tauride Palace, the party center was pulled toward the petty bourgeois slogan of “defense,” and critical support of the Provisional Government. ‘Down with the Ten Minister Capitalists!’ ‘Down with the Offensive’ ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ The ironical smiles froze, and then gradually disappeared. He achieves in his image of the revolution the unity of the subjective and objective elements.1. Lenin’s ability to win the party over was not based on his oratorical skills or dictatorial command of the membership. But the situation changes the moment the victory is won and its political fortification begins. The original language is Russian, but it was translated into English by Max Eastmanin 1932; in the English translation the second volume, originally consisting of tw… Hearing this news, the Liberal Duma representatives hastily formed a Provisional Committee, as if cobbling together a raft to ride out the breaking wave of revolution.