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    Vol.62/No.40           November 9, 1998 
 
 
Russia, 1917: How Working People Took Power  

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
November, 1998 marks the 81st anniversary of the victory of the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, where the working class was able to take and hold state power for the first time ever. (This is often called the October revolution, because the Byzantine calendar still in use in Russia then was 13 days behind the modern Western calendar.) In the February 1917 revolution, which swept the Tzar's monarchy from power, workers and soldiers established soviets, or councils, to represent them. The majority still had illusions in the liberal and reformist parties, and an increasingly unstable bourgeois government was installed. By October, however, the Bolsheviks were the elected majority in many of the soviets. The excerpt below is from the article "Communism and the Fight for a Popular Revolutionary Government: 1848 to Today," published in issue no. 3 of the Marxist magazine New International. It takes up the particular importance of the alliance of workers and peasants. The article is copyright c 1984 by 408 Printing and Publishing, reprinted by permission.

By the fall of 1917 the majority of the working class had been convinced of the need to transfer all power to the soviets. That having been accomplished, [V.I.] Lenin insisted, the proletariat could win the peasant majority to its side only by proving that the soviets were strong enough to take power and would guarantee the peasants the right to work the lands they were seizing.

A decisive factor in convincing the Bolsheviks that there could be no delay in organizing an insurrection in the fall of 1917 was the rapid spread of peasant land seizures, which had broken out in virtually every part of Russia after the failure of the counterrevolutionary military coup by General Kornilov in August..

"Only the revolutionary workers, if supported by the peasant poor," Lenin said, "are capable of smashing the resistance of the capitalists and leading the people in gaining land without compensation, complete liberty, victory over famine and the war, and a just and lasting peace."

The Russian peasants "must be wrested from the influence of the bourgeoisie," Lenin insisted in a pamphlet written a few days later in September. "That is the sole guarantee of salvation for the revolution.

It is "only our victory in the metropolitan cities," he wrote in a September 1917 letter to the Bolshevik leadership, "that will carry the peasants with us."

The question of "the firm course to take, of courage and resolve, is not a personal matter, but a question of which class is capable of manifesting courage and resolve. The only class capable of this is the proletariat." That was the class basis on which the Bolsheviks charted their course, not only throughout 1917 and in the years following the October revolution, but from their emergence as a distinct political current in 1903. They built a party of the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat, based among the industrial workers, that could lead the entire working class despite its stratification and divisions, as well as the exploited petty bourgeoisie, rural and urban, toward power.

In October 1917, at the decisive turning point in the revolution, the Bolsheviks led the insurrection against the capitalist regime and declared that they were ready to establish a government of the new Bolshevik majority in the soviets alone, if no other soviet party would join them. The new workers' and peasants' government immediately began to implement radical policies that could "wrest" the majority of the peasantry from the tutelage of the bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois political servants. From that point on, the challenge before the working class vanguard was to sustain and broaden the proletariat's alliance with the exploited peasants, on which the survival of the new power depended.

"Comrades, the workers' and peasants' revolution, about the necessity of which the Bolsheviks have always spoken, has been accomplished," Lenin said in the opening sentence of his speech to the victorious soviet congress on the night of October 25-26.

"What is the significance of this workers' and peasants' revolution?" he continued. "Its significance is, first of all, that we shall have a Soviet government, our own organ of power, in which the bourgeoisie will have no share whatsoever. The oppressed masses will themselves create a power. The old state apparatus will be shattered to its foundations and a new administrative apparatus set up in the form of the Soviet organisations.

"From now on," he said, "a new phase in the history of Russia begins, and this, the third Russian revolution, should in the end lead to the victory of socialism."

Having conquered power, Lenin said, the first task of the new revolutionary government was "to put an immediate end to the war." Its proposal for an immediate and just peace, he said, would be welcomed by growing numbers of workers throughout Europe who were being driven toward revolution by the horrors and sacrifices of the war.

"Within Russia," Lenin said, "a huge section of the peasantry have said that they have played long enough with the capitalists, and will now march with the workers. A single decree putting an end to landed proprietorship will win us the confidence of the peasants. The peasants will understand that the salvation of the peasantry lies only in an alliance with the workers."

With this firm worker-peasant alliance, and the prospect of aid from revolutions elsewhere in Europe, Lenin said, "We must now set about building a proletarian socialist state in Russia."

The government established on that night of October 25-26 was called on Lenin's proposal, "the provisional workers' and peasants' government" of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The word "provisional" was dropped several months later.

What was the class nature of this new government? What was its relationship to the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry that the Bolsheviks called for from 1905 on, and that Lenin insisted was partially realized as one pole of the dual power that arose out of the February revolution?

Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders considered the revolutionary dictatorship that was born in October 1917 a dictatorship of the proletariat, in that the proletariat alone led that new power. Dual power having been resolved by the October insurrection, however, the first task of these triumphant workers', peasants', and soldiers' councils was to implement the programs that the Bolsheviks had advocated for a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry since the early years of the century. These included total destruction of the old tsarist state apparatus, a thoroughgoing land reform, guarantees of self-determination for the oppressed nations, workers' control over production to keep the factories in operation and prevent capitalist sabotage. Immediate steps to withdraw from the imperialist war and emergency measures to organize the distribution of food and other necessities were implemented.  
 
 
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