Vol. 71/No. 17      April 30, 2007

BY LEON TROTSKY  
Upon a close examination, the means and implements of the Bolshevik agitation seem not only completely out of proportion to the political influence of Bolshevism, but simply amazing in their insignificance. Up to the July days the party had 41 publications counting weeklies and monthlies, with a total circulation, counting everything, of 320,000. After the July raids the circulation dwindled by half. At the end of August the central organ of the Party was printing 50,000 copies. In the days when the party was winning over the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, the cash in the treasury of the Central Committee amounted to only 30,000 paper rubles.

The intelligentsia hardly came into the Bolshevik party at all. A broad layer of so-called “old Bolsheviks,” from among the students who had associated themselves with the revolution of 1905, had since turned into extraordinarily successful engineers, physicians, government officials, and they now unceremoniously showed the party the hostile aspect of their backs. Even in Petrograd there was felt at every step a lack of journalists, speakers, agitators; and the provinces were wholly deprived of what few they had had. “There are no leaders; there are no politically literate people who can explain to the masses what the Bolsheviks want!”—this cry came from hundreds of remote corners, and especially from the front. In the villages there were almost no Bolshevik nuclei at all. Postal communications were in complete disorder. The local organizations, left to their own devices, would occasionally reproach the Central Committee—and not without foundation—that it was concerning itself only with Petrograd.

How was it that with this weak apparatus and this negligible circulation of the party press, the ideas and slogans of Bolshevism were able to take possession of the people? The explanation is very simple: those slogans which correspond to the keen demands of a class and an epoch create thousands of channels for themselves. A red-hot revolutionary medium is a high conductor of ideas. The Bolshevik papers were read aloud, were read all to pieces. The most important articles were learned by heart, recited, copied, and wherever possible reprinted. “Our staff printing plant,” says the soldier, Pereiko, “performed a great service for the revolution. How many individual articles from Pravda were reprinted by us, and how many small brochures, very close and comprehensible to the soldiers! And all these were swiftly distributed along the front with the help of air mails, bicycles and motorcycles… .” At the same time the bourgeois press, although supplied to the front free of cost in millions of copies, hardly found a reader. The heavy bales remained unopened. This boycott of the “patriotic” press at times assumed a demonstrative form. Representatives of the 18th Siberian division passed a resolution asking the bourgeois parties to stop sending literature, inasmuch as it was “fruitlessly used to boil the hot water for tea.” The Bolshevik press was very differently employed. Hence the coefficient of its useful—or if you prefer, harmful—effectiveness was incomparably higher.

The usual explanation of the success of Bolshevism reduced itself to a remark upon “the simplicity of its slogans,” which fell in with the desires of the masses. In this there is a certain element of truth. The wholeness of the Bolshevik policy was due to the fact that, in contrast to the “democratic parties,” the Bolsheviks were free from unexpressed or semi-expressed gospels reducing themselves in the last analysis to a defense of private property. However, that distinction alone does not exhaust the matter… . What distinguished Bolshevism was that it subordinated the subjective goal, the defense of the interests of the popular masses, to the laws of revolution as an objectively conditioned process… .

Revolutions are always verbose, and the Bolsheviks did not escape from this law. But whereas the agitation of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries was scattered, self-contradictory and oftenest of all evasive, the agitation of the Bolsheviks was distinguished by its concentrated and well thought-out character. The Compromisers talked themselves out of difficulties; the Bolsheviks went to meet them. A continual analysis of the objective situation, a testing of slogans upon facts, a serious attitude to the enemy even when he was none too serious, gave special strength and power of conviction to the Bolshevik agitation.

The party press did not exaggerate success, did not distort the correlation of forces; did not try to win by shouting. The school of Lenin was a school of revolutionary realism. The data supplied by the Bolshevik press of 1917 are proving, in the light of historic criticism and the documents of the epoch, incomparably more correct than the data supplied by all the other newspapers. This correctness was a result of the revolutionary strength of the Bolsheviks, but at the same time it reinforced their strength.  
 
 
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