In the excerpts that follow, Trotsky explains the class character of the Bolshevik Party and tells how worker-Bolsheviks helped lead the February 1917 revolution that overthrew tzarism, and then played the decisive role in winning over the mass of toilers to the need for the workers and peasants to take power in their own hands.

This perspective of the fight for power is summarized in the final excerpt, which refers to a June 1917 congress where the Bolsheviks under Lenin were a small minority. Four months later, they would win the majority of the working people to the perspective of seizing power.  
 

These leaders had often been left to themselves, had nourished themselves upon fragments of revolutionary generalizations arriving in their hands by various routes, had studied out by themselves between the lines of the liberal papers what they needed. Their class instinct was refined by a political criterion, and though they did not think all their ideas through to the end, nevertheless their thought ceaselessly and stubbornly worked its way in a single direction. Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down through the mass and created, invisibly to a superficial glance but no less decisively, an inner mechanics of the revolutionary movement as a conscious process.

To the smug politicians of liberalism and tamed socialism everything that happens among masses is customarily represented as an instinctive process, no matter whether they are dealing with an anthill or a beehive. In reality the thought which was drilling through the thick of the working class was far bolder, more penetrating, more conscious, than those little ideas by which the educated classes live. Moreover, this thought was more scientific: not only because it was to a considerable degree fertilized with the methods of Marxism, but still more because it was ever nourishing itself on the living experience of the masses which were soon to take their place on the revolutionary arena. Thoughts are scientific if they correspond to an objective process and make it possible to influence that process and guide it.

To the question, Who led the February revolution? we can then answer definitely enough: Conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.  
 

Although separated from these workers by two war fronts, and almost without communication, Lenin had never lost touch with them. "Let the war, jails, Siberia, hard labor, shatter them twice, ten times, you cannot destroy that stratum. It is alive. It is imbued with revolutionism and anti-chauvinism."

In his mind Lenin had been living through the events along with these worker-Bolsheviks, making with them the necessary inferences — only broader and more boldly than they. In his struggle with the indecisiveness of the staff and the broad officer layer of the party, Lenin confidently relied on its under-officer layer which better reflected the rank-and-file worker-Bolshevik.  
 

In a speech at that same session Lenin explained his reply from the benches: "The Citizen Minister of Posts and Telegraph (Tseretelli) said that there is no political party in Russia which would express its readiness to take upon itself the whole power. I answer there is. No party can decline to do that, and our party does not decline. It is ready at any minute to take the whole power. (Applause and laughter.) You may laugh all you want to, but if the Citizen Minister puts this question to us he will get the proper answer."  
 
 
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