1917 and the revisionists

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993 by Richard Pipes

There is no mystery why the Communist nomenklatura should have insisted on the "popular" and "democratic" nature of the upheaval that had brought it to power. Lacking either czarism's traditional mandate or a popular mandate validated by elections, they had to have recourse to a nebulous historic claim of support by an abstraction called "the masses." It is less apparent why a Western historian, not subject to party controls, should embrace such a fatuous claim.

For the facts bearing on the circumstances under which the Bolsheviks took power show it to be devoid of substance. Even the chief managers of October, Lenin and Trotsky, did not pretend (except in a rhetorical fashion) that they responded to popular clamor and were carried to power on the shoulders of the masses. Lenin instructed his followers in Russia to arm the workers for a rising against the Provisional Government at the beginning of March 1917, the instant he had learned in Switzerland of the February Revolution; he justified his startling strategy in the "April Theses" on returning to Russia four weeks later. This stance he assumed before the population had had time to become disenchanted with the new order: it was an a priori political decision inspired by the conviction that the liberal and socialist intellectuals running the Provisional Government were both inept and weak. The wishes of the "masses" did not even enter his calculations.

Lenin altogether did not believe in popular revolutions. In July 1917 he wrote: "in times of revolution it is not enough to ascertain the 'will of the majority' ... we see countless instances of how the better organized, more conscious, better-armed minority imposed its will on the majority and conquered it."(10) These words would seem to range Lenin on the side not of the revisionists but of their opponents. In September and October 1917, while hiding from the police and out of touch with the day-to-day activities of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Lenin sent it urgent letters demanding that an armed insurrection be carried out without further delays. Never mind the Second Congress of Soviets, which his followers wanted officially to proclaim the new regime: no revolution waits for votes. Seize power and then we will take care of the rest. Unless you act promptly all will be lost. These were not the counsels of a man who saw himself as a tool of the people. Lenin's sense of urgency was due, above all, to the fear--justified by subsequent events--that the elections to the Constituent Assembly, scheduled for mid-November, would reveal the Bolsheviks to be a minority party not empowered to speak in the name of the "masses."

During the night of October 10, the Bolshevik Central Committee finally resolved to seize power. The decision was taken in deepest secrecy: when, a few days later, in a newspaper interview, Kamenev revealed Bolshevik intentions, the outraged Lenin demanded that he be expelled from the party. This was the behavior of a classic conspirator rather than of someone acting in response to pressures "from below."