This piece is an edited version of a speech originally given by Coco Smyth on November 7th, 2024 at a meeting celebrating the 107th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. This meeting was hosted by Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists and People’s Defense Columbus (then known as Rising Tide Columbus).
This piece aims to introduce those newly joining the socialist movement to the significance of the October Revolution and give a background to the historical and theoretical discussions within the Russian revolutionary movement which informed the transition of the revolution in Russia from a bourgeois to a proletarian revolution. These debates are essential to understand for those who are committed to the continuing struggle for international working class revolution.
“The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.” -Lenin, 1917
107 years ago today, a new era of human history began. As long as there has been history — that is, as long as humans have been keeping track of history in written form — our societies have been divided into classes. From chieftains, to kings, slave owners, feudal lords and aristocracies up to our modern presidents and capitalists, civilizations everywhere have been presided over by a privileged minority in control of an oppressed majority. Despite wars, peasant and slave revolts, riots, revolutions, economic transformations and catastrophes, this rule of a minority has remained firmly in place through all kinds of upheavals.
Always, this minority maintains control of the wealth and productive forces of society. This social layer always has access to society’s collective knowledge and determines how the lives of the majority are to be lived through the use of state power — namely violence and coercion.
For the first time in history, on November 7th, 1917, this ironclad rule of human society was shattered in a significant way. Throughout history we’ve seen momentary glimpses of what rule by the majority could look like in peasant and slave revolts and in the first rumblings of revolution in the capitalist world like the Paris Commune of 1871. But in the collapsing Czarist Russian Empire in 1917, over 100 million people saw a new state-of-affairs and the masses — the working class and the peasantry — took power into their own hands.
Why study the revolution? It’s for much the same reason that an engineer studies to learn how to build a plane. Fighting for a liberated and just society is like trying to build a plane. In order to have any chance of making anything that can fly, you must have some understanding of physics and engineering. Beyond that, studying already existing designs is extremely important. Thankfully we don’t have to start from scratch building a plane. The dangerous trial and error process has already been done and we can use the discoveries of those who came before us. Presumably for many thousands of years, humans have wondered about flight and some more daring, or blockheaded, people have attempted it and failed miserably. This all changed at the turn of the 20th century when the Wright Brothers finally got their design to work. Since then thousands of others have perfected the designs of those who came before, and now flight is taken for granted.
The same dynamics go for the revolutions which came before our time. Workers and revolutionaries across the world have developed their ideas and strategies and put them to the test time and time again. The successes and failures of our predecessors are the material we have to work with in fighting for revolutionary change today.
We must study the Bolshevik Revolution because it is a treasure trove of both theoretical and practical knowledge which we can use to develop our current struggles more effectively. We must learn how to analyze the political dynamics of our society — the state, the economy, our workplaces, our communities. We need this understanding to organize ourselves in the most effective ways.
In October 1917, the working class seized power for the first time in history in the remnants of the Russian Empire. Over the course of a year centuries of Czarist Absolutism was brought to an end and Russia was transformed from one of the most backwards and reactionary societies into the most progressive in world history. My presentation seeks to make sense of this startling transformation and offer a breakdown of the history of the Russian Revolution from the birth of the Marxist movement in the late 1800s through the October Revolution, finishing up at the decline of the international revolutionary wave by the early 1920s.
To understand the Russian Revolution, we need to first step back to understand the historical context which informed the struggle against Czarism and the revolutionary movement for socialism.
We’ll start at the turn of the 20th century. Russia stood in quite a unique position as an entity in the early 1900s. On the one hand, Russia was a large and influential empire which played an important role in international imperialist politics ( size) and was core to the imperialist alliance system that dominated Europe in this period. The Czarist state controlled the states now known as Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.
Despite its predominance in the world-system, Czarist Russia was a profoundly backward empire. Russia was a late-comer to capitalism, maintaining a feudal economic and political order all the way up to the 20th century. The development of capitalist industry was quite sluggish thanks to the continuing influence of the old feudal aristocracy and the conservatism of the Czarist state. Capitalist industry and consequently the working class were relegated to a handful of the most advanced cities, such as Petrograd and Moscow. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of the Czar’s subjects, life continued much as it had for thousands of years. The overwhelming majority of Russians were peasants presided over by a landed aristocracy. These peasants had only gained liberation from serfdom a couple decades before. Peasants had been tied to land and bought and sold as farm equipment like a plow or a sickle.
Though the clock seemed stopped for the millions of average Russians, time had moved on rapidly in the rest of the imperialist core. Great Britain, Germany, the United States, and France in particular had developed rapidly over the past century and had revolutionized both their economic and social relations.
Watching developments in the West, both the ruling class of Russia and elements of the intelligentsia and the lower classes yearned for change. While the Czars wanted to approach modernity at a steady pace, they did not want to sacrifice their traditions and power for the sake of progress. Much discontent developed however among the lower classes with the oppressive and backwards social order.
The newly developing capitalist class desired a new social order as well. A social order amenable to their interests, with pro-business policies, anti-aristocratic measures, and more democratic rights and influence over the Czarist state. On the other hand, more radical movements, inspired by revolutionary movements in the West, began to inspire elements of Russia’s intelligentsia and small sections of the peasantry.
Various political trends began to develop offering different visions of the future of Russia and how to bring it about. The first modern oppositional trends against Czarism developed first among Russia’s intelligentsia. Through the last half of the 1800s, 2 main radical trends emerged — a liberal democratic and a radical democratic politics. The liberal wing of the reform movement wanted to pressure the Czar to adopt a democratic state favorable to the capitalist class along the lines of Great Britain through political pressure. On the other hand the radical wing of the intelligentsia desired a radically different Russia based on radical democracy and uplifted the peasantry. Their politics weren’t only radical — their methods were too.
These radicals, referred to as “Narodniks” advocated a mixture of organizing and mobilizing the peasants and anti-Czarist terrorism. Despite their overall lack of success in politicizing the Russian peasantry, these Narodnik radicals brought modern mass politics to the Russian Empire and inspired the next generation of revolutionaries across the political spectrum.
The first period of Narodnism came to an abrupt end after they successfully assassinated Czar Alexander II, the grandfather of the last Czar of Russia, Nicholas. The Czarist state crushed the Narodnik organizers through executions, imprisonment, and exile to Siberia.
With the challenge to their rule destroyed, the Czar and the Russian aristocracy were free to pursue their own plan of modernization without democracy for quite a while.
This historic defeat of the Narodniks did not kill radical movements however. For a time they went deep underground, but a new generation of militants would take up the mantle of revolutionary struggle after grappling with the defeat of Narodnism. This new generation would become the generation of 1905 and 1917 revolutions. Consequently, it’s vital to sum-up the parties these organizers built, their programs for the future, and their methods, as they would play a vital role in the struggle of the masses in the era of revolutions.
First, there was the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the direct inheritors of the politics of the Narodniks This party continued the earlier focus of of the Narodniks on the revolutionary role of the peasantry, the majority of the Russian population. They fought for a revolution led by the peasantry which would redistribute the land and create a form of peasant socialism. They continued their traditional mixture of terrorism seeking to destabilize the Czarist state and organizing among the peasants.
Secondly, there were the bourgeois liberals of the Cadet Party. These reformers hailing from the small Russian capitalist class and elements of the intelligentsia wanted to implement the type of capitalist democracy present in the West. The right wing of the liberal movement wanted to put pressure on the Czar to institute a constitutional monarchy whereas the left-wing of liberalism called for a bourgeois republic without a king along the lines of the United States.
The third and final major political trend was a newcomer to Russia — Marxism. Inspired by the mass working class movements in Germany, France, and Great Britain, a section of the intelligentsia looked to the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to move past the failures of Narodnism. This movement began first as small study circles consisting of intellectuals and workers which aimed to understand Marxism and begin to apply it to Russia’s unique conditions. Eventually these scattered groups constituted the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898.
Marxism argues that the working class is the social force which can lead a socialist revolution and abolish class-rule. Given that the working class was a small minority in Russian society, Russian Marxist theorists engaged in a protracted struggle from the first days of the movement all the way past the October Revolution about what kind of revolution was needed in Russia and who would need to lead it.
The standpoint the early movement gravitated towards derived from a traditional view of Marxism that dominated socialist politics in Western Europe at the time. This viewpoint argued that a bourgeois revolution and significant industrial development was a prerequisite for workers power and socialist revolution. Consequently, early Russian Marxists saw their task as organizing the working class to aid the bourgeois-democratic revolution which the newly emerging capitalist class would have to lead. Their immediate fight was against Czarism, for political freedom and democracy. All of these would be needed for the growth of industry and necessarily also for the growth of the working class, the social base of Marxism. Russian Marxists then saw their task as organizing the existing working class to help bring down the Czar under the leadership of the emerging capitalist class.
By 1900 this traditional view was facing challenges among some Marxist organizers, but it would take the unfolding of history to put these ideas to the test. By the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, the 2 major branches of Russian Marxism began to take shape, the Mensheviks (Minority) and the Bolsheviks (Majority). Though the original divergence between the 2 factions of the RSDLP was relatively minor, it would come to represent 2 different philosophies in both theory and practice.
The outbreak of an imperialist war between Russia and Japan over control of Manchuria and Korea threw this unstable society into crisis. Surprising almost all spectators in Europe, most of all Russians themselves, the Japanese imperial army decimated Russia’s fleet and handed the Russian Empire a startling defeat. The consequences of this loss added more gasoline on the combustible web of contradictions in Russian society.
All these contradictions came to a head in 1905 during a labor demonstration headed by the police-sponsored Russian Orthodox religious worker leader, Father Gapon. Gapon and thousands of workers marched to the Czar’s Winter Palace in a peaceful and conciliatory demonstration to present a petition pleading for the betterment of the rights of the working class. Without provocation the Czarist Imperial Guard opened fire on the peaceful demonstration, leading to more than 200 deaths, 1000 injuries, and thousands more arrests in what became known as Bloody Sunday.
This mass repression lit the subterranean fire of unrest into an inferno enveloping the whole country. Workers in all urban areas participated in long and explosive strikes against repression, for political freedom, and for workers power. Peasant uprisings broke out in the countryside, with the looting of the nobility’s manors and expropriation of land by the peasants. In the borderlands, oppressed minorities too participated in mass resistance, from Jews to Poles, and Muslims in Central Asia.
This mass upheaval brought existential fear to the Czarist autocracy. Czar Nicholas after serious pressure from his advisors decided to try to placate mass discontent by allowing for limited Constitutional Monarchy. The new parliament, the Duma, was created, and the Czar made a number of concessions in a liberal democratic direction.
The most important development in the revolution however was the creation of a new form of organization — the Soviet. Translated as “council” in English, the Soviets were organizations which came together in the heat of the revolution to offer a vehicle for working class and peasant power. Radicalized workers across industries decided they needed a body to organize for their collective interests. These Soviets were comprised of elected representatives from different unions and industries and the representatives of leftist and working class parties. The primary political forces present in these Soviets were the RSDLP, both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, and the Socialist Revolutionaries.
Seeing a lull in militancy and vitality in the revolutionary movement, the Czar finally decided to strike. Mobilizing loyal troops, they dispersed the Soviets and reinstituted “order”. Lacking the ability to resist militarily or mobilize effectively enough to counter this offensive, the Soviets were shut down with surprisingly little effort. The liberals had been placated while the energy of the workers and peasants had been spent.
So began the wave of repression. The Socialist, working class, and peasant leaders were rounded up and either executed, sent into concentration camps in Siberia, or exiled outside of the Russian Empire. Those revolutionaries who were able to avoid the long arm of the Czarist secret police went underground or fled to Western Europe.
Revolutionaries in Russia learned one of the hardest lessons of revolution. “Revolutionaries who only make the revolution halfway dig their own graves.” Or as Mao stated it “You can’t skin a tiger by the paw.” The prospects for the revolutionary movement were even darker then they had been before the 1905 Revolution. With the leaders and organizers of the revolutionary parties dead, imprisoned, or in exile, the working class and peasants returned to a reality all the more bitter because they had just tasted freedom for the first time.
The Czar quickly made clear he had no intention to allow the Duma to have any real power or to lessen his absolute power any further. Nonetheless, the liberal elites who demanded the Duma accepted the restrictions in democratic rights while the workers and peasants were too demoralized to act.
By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, Europe was a powder-keg. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the division of the whole world between capitalist powers, most notably Great Britain and France. Africa and Asia were subjugated by colonialist rule, and the imperialist powers used their military dominance to expand their economic and political dominance across the globe. Total control of the world by a small set of imperial powers created a period of relative “peace” — that is, large-scale war between the Great Powers was rare while wars between the imperialists and colonized people tended to be brutal but short.
This illusion of peace and stability began to break apart in the early 1900s as later-developing capitalist powers like Germany, Italy, and Russia and other smaller European states yearned for a piece of the imperial pie with its promise of modernization and development. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by a Serbian nationalist set the precarious balance of power alight. The whole of Europe factionalized, seeking to use claims of grievance to justify using the situation to accomplish their preexisting political aims. Quickly, Europe divided between two alliances — the Allies, consisting of France, the UK, Russia, Italy, and Japan, and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Hungary, and Bulgaria. So began the bloodiest war in world history up until that point — the First World War.
Despite the unpredictable corcumstances leading to its outbreak, the start of a world war was no surprise for the powerful socialist movement of Europe. The Second International, an association of most of the Marxist parties of Europe and North America, had predicted such a war was coming for more than a decade and had put out statement after statement about the working class's duty to resist the war in the name of internationalism and socialism once it came.
The day of reckoning had finally come and something that nearly no one predicted happened. A wave of euphoria gripped Europe — a war fever. All classes and social groups seemed to be all in for the war. This fever even hit large portions of the workers, many of whom saw participating in the “heroism” of war as a preferable alternative to the grinding poverty, exploitation, and drudgery of life in the exploited class.
Most surprisingly of all, the shining star of Marxism, the German Social Democratic Party, voted for war credits and supported the imperialist aims of their own government. This was such an about-face from Marxism and the statements of the Party itself that Lenin refused to believe that it was true for days. He believed that the news was propaganda from the ruling class to confuse the working class and bring the socialist movement into the war. The social-democrats made this shocking turn for a couple reasons, foremost among them being:
This historic tragedy for the socialist movement demonstrated that the entrenched leaders of many parties had abandoned the fight for revolution and workers’ rule in favor of gradual reform, accommodation to imperialism, and collaboration with the capitalist class.
After coming to accept the terrible reality that not only the German Social Democratic Party, but also a majority of the key parties of the Second International had decided to abandon internationalism and support their own nations in WW1, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party began organizing the scattered and disoriented revolutionary anti-war elements. This was one of the darkest moments in the history of the socialist movement — a time of terrible disillusionment and marginalization. Despite memberships of hundreds of thousands of workers in the socialist parties, the number of internationalists in the world could fit in 4 stage coaches as Lenin joked bitterly in 1915.
This was a time of deep crisis and destruction, so much so that at the start of 1917 Lenin dejectedly stated that he didn’t believe he’d live to see the revolution in his lifetime to a small crowd of young Swedish radicals. However, this was also a time of rebirth and moving forward. The Bolsheviks and the other small groups of leftists like those grouped around Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, grappled with the devastation of the movement, attempted to explain it, and began laying down the theoretical and practical basis for a new Left.
Soon enough, the war fever of 1914 dissipated as quickly as it had risen and discontent began to grow among the masses across Europe, Asia, and Africa. The delusion of a heroic war died in the trenches that spread like a cancer across Europe. Millions of young men, mainly workers and peasants, were thrown into a modern war totally unlike their fantasies. A war of artillery, machine guns, poison gas, and of drudgery and disease. Meanwhile, things were little better on the home fronts. Men, women, and children were mobilized into a war footing — with long hours at work and little food or joy.
The crisis was particularly acute for the Russian people whose men were conscripted into battle without weapons and whose women and children faced dire conditions at home. Just as during the Russo-Japanese War, the anger and desire for justice rose as the fortunes of the Russian military fell.
By February of 1917, discontent was reaching a boiling point when workers in Petrograd’s largest factory, the Putilov Factory, went on strike against the Czarist government on February 18. The strike continued through the week until International Womens’ Day. A mass demonstration of primarily women workers gathered to commemorate the day and denounce the food rationing the Czar had imposed. Workers went from factory to factory and workplace to workplace to call more women to the streets, expanding the strike further. In the next couple of hours, the protest grew to a mixed-gender crowd of over 200,000. The demonstrators called for an end to the rationing, the war, and the Czarist regime.
In only 2 weeks, the Czar was forced to abdicate by his advisors. Euphoria gripped the population of the Empire, triumphant that the decades-long struggle against Czarism had come to fruition so suddenly. At the start of every great revolution, the spirit of revolution seems to infuse everybody and everything with a new life. There is a feeling of profound unity and victory — that the whole people is now striking out to build a better world. Everybody from peasants and workers, to capitalists and aristocrats proclaim their revolutionary zeal and seem to unite with the mass of the people.
Quickly a new Provisional Government (PG) was cobbled together with the participation of all the forces of change. The Kadet Party, constituted by the liberal bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, worked together hand-in-hand with the worker and peasant parties, from the SRs and Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks.
Just as this period of unity and euphoria is universal at the beginning of a great revolution, it also universally breaks on the rocks of the real contradictions which continue in society. The old order was toppled, but the new society still had to be built, and the classes and parties of the Russian Empire offered starkly different visions of what that society would be.
Despite the overthrow of the Czar, the peoples of the colonized borderlands of the Empire continued to be subject to Great Russian domination. The capitalists only expanded their political and economic power. The Great War continued and the grinding poverty and exploitation of the working class and peasantry continued too.
Remembering the experience of 1905, workers, peasants, and soldiers began organizing themselves straight away. Soviet councils of workers, peasants, and soldiers spread across the whole Empire like a wildfire. The worker council form spread far further far faster than in 1905 thanks to the past revolutionary experience of 1905.
Consequently, a new situation gripped Russia – Dual Power. From the first days after the February Revolution both the provisional government and the soviets began to act as state forces. Both institutions made decisions that a government would make. But dual power is an inherently unstable situation. 2 state powers can only exist in a deeply destabilized society.
The first major act of the Petrograd Soviet, Order Number 1, highlighted this fight for power between the PG and the Soviets from the early days of the Revolution. On March 1, the Soviet issued an order that instructed soldiers and sailors to obey their officers and the Provisional Government only if their orders did not contradict the decrees of the Petrograd Soviet. It also called on units to elect representatives to the Soviet and for each unit to elect a committee which would run the unit. All weapons were to be handed over to these committees "and shall by no means be issued to the officers, not even at their insistence." The order also allowed soldiers to dispense with standing to attention and saluting when off-duty, although strict military discipline was to be maintained while on duty. Officers were no longer to be addressed as "Your Excellency" but rather as "Sir" ("Gospodin", in Russian); nor were they to execute, corporally punish or even verbally abuse their soldiers.
The long-standing programs of the revolutionary parties were soon put to the test in this period of the revolution. In the first days after February, the Socialist Revolutionary Party had a hegemonic influence over the Russian populace. The Mensheviks too won a large base among workers while the Bolsheviks constituted only a small minority.
All parties, from the liberals to the Bolsheviks began work in the Provisional Government while the SRs and the Mensheviks won leadership in the newly forming Soviets. With massive popular support the Provisional Government began its work.
Despite the clear sentiments of the Russian masses, the Provisional Government doubled down on fighting the World War. The leaders argued that now that the masses of people had done away with Czarism, they could win the War in alliance with Great Britain and France against so-called German militarism. The imperialist war had become a “revolutionary war” according to the pro-war parties.
The Provisional Government pursued a program of democratic reform while attempting to maintain the fundamental economic and political policies of the past Czarist government. The liberals wanted the revolution to end as quickly as possible to consolidate bourgeois rule. Meanwhile the SRs and Mensheviks continued with their view that the capitalists must bring Russia through the stage of democracy before the working classes could secure power through their own revolution. Consequently they believed it was vital they use their mass influence to support the Provisional Government.
Meanwhile the Soviets posed a problem for the socialist parties. On the one hand they were comprised of the base of socialism – the workers, peasants, and soldiers. On the other hand, the Soviets and the workers who they represented recognized the authority of the SRs and Mensheviks, parties which eschewed workers revolution to a later date. The Soviets were a complicating factor then for the SRs and Mensheviks. In a new capitalist and democratic Russia, what role were the Soviets supposed to play? The reformist parties determined that they were a temporary inconvenience. They needed to fold the soviets behind the Provisional Government to make sure Russia entered its democratic and capitalist stage.
In the meanwhile, the Bolsheviks continued to organize as a militant and revolutionary minority, both within the Provisional Government and the Soviets. The Bolsheviks leaders still in Russia during the outbreak of the revolution also got swept up in the masses cry of unity, seeking a merger with their long-standing rivals in the Menshevik Party.
Hearing the news from Europe and America, the long-exiled leaders of the revolutionary movement rushed back to Russia to join the revolution they had spent decades of hardship and toil trying to bring about. As part of this rush, revolutionary leaders struck a deal to take a sealed train from Switzerland through Germany back to Russia. As a sign of goodwill, Lenin insisted on bringing representatives of the whole movement, so of the 32 revolutionary leaders on the train, only 12 were Bolsheviks. Seeing the Russian radicals off at the train station, Lenin’s last words to German communist Willi Munzenberg were, “"Either we'll be swinging from the gallows in three months or we shall be in power."
Getting off the train in Russia, Vladimir Lenin climbed atop the train and delivered a speech that shocked the thousands who had gathered to welcome the exiled revolutionaries back to the Russian Empire. Lenin declared “The people need peace; the people need bread; the people need land. And they give you war, hunger, no bread … We must fight for the socialist revolution, fight to the end, until the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!" There he delivered his famous “April Theses” which called for the PG to be done away with in favor of a soviet government of the working class, peasants, and soldiers which would implement a socialist program. This broke both from the theoretical orthodoxy of Russian Marxists and the practical activities of the Bolsheviks since the February Revolution. Lenin’s position was not popular at the beginning, but he pulled out all the stops to fight for his position within the Bolshevik Party. Pointing out the strength and potential of the Soviets, he eventually won a narrow majority at a Bolshevik conference to fight for a soviet government.
From then on, the Bolshevik Party’s program was summarized as “Peace, land, bread, and a soviet government.” Bolshevik organizers in the army and the factories demonstrated all of the betrayals and capitulations of the Provisional Government and organized more militant action. This agitation infuriated the Cadets, Mensheviks, and SRs in the PG and those among them leading the Soviets. They denounced the Bolsheviks as German agents, counter-revolutionaries, and anarchists.
Despite a worsening political, military, and economic situation, the Bolsheviks gained influence but remained a minority. Things were brought to a head in July 1917 when an organic mass demonstration of armed workers and soldiers called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks attempted to convince the radical workers that they needed to pull back because they still didn’t have the power to win against the Provisional Government across Russia. Agitated, the armed demonstrators bristled at the Bolshevik’s apparent conservatism but they pulled back from launching an armed insurrection against the PG.
Despite the Bolsheviks calls for moderation, the Provisional Government and the Mensheviks and SRs within the Soviets decided now was the time to strike against the revolutionary left. They banned the Bolshevik Party. Leaders including Trotsky were arrested while Lenin went into hiding. Many believed this was the end of the Bolshevik Party.
But then a new catastrophe began. General Kornilov, a reactionary military leader, decided that the revolution had gone far enough. He thought now was the time to crush both the PG and the Soviets and institute a military dictatorship under his rule. With the support of British imperialism and the liberal section of the Provisional Government, Kornilov marched his army to Petrograd to “restore order.” Panicking, the socialist elements of the Provisional Government and the Soviets prepared a Committee of Struggle Against the Counterrevolution. Among the immediate measures taken were the legalization of the Bolshevik Party, the release from prison of Marxist and Anarchist organizers, and the provision of arms to the workers and radical political parties in preparation for a military defense of Petrograd.
Recognizing the existential threat to them all, the radicals and reformists came together to resist the restoration of a reactionary political order. Coming out of prison or hiding, the Bolshevik leaders and their military wing went to work to prepare against the Kornilov invasion. Bolshevik and other revolutionary organizers organized the railway workers union to halt the advance of Kornilov’s Army towards Petrograd and they infiltrated Kornilov’s army itself to encourage desertion or rebellion among the common soldiers. Without firing a bullet, the revolutionaries prevented Kornilov’s army from reaching Petrograd and he went into retreat, defeated.
Despite surviving this right wing coup attempt, the Provisional Government had just dug its own grave. To defend themselves, they rearmed the Bolshevik Party’s military wing and radical workers. Additionally, the collusion of elements of the PG with Kornilov proved to be the last straw for many workers who still held illusions in the PG. The Bolsheviks had proven that they were the only force which could defeat counter-revolutionary forces and deepen the revolution.
The Bolsheviks demands for peace, land, bread, and a Soviet government reached unparalled levels of popularity. With their mass appeal surging, the Bolsheviks demanded that the still Menshevik and SR leadership of the Petrograd Soviet call the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets which they had been postponing for months at this point. Since the SR and Menshevik leaders believed the Soviet form was only a detour on the path to a democratic and capitalist government that the upcoming Constitutent Assembly would finally constitute. They didn’t want to bring together the forces of the Soviets that had developed deeply all across the Empire among the workers, peasants, and soldiers. They also recognized the Bolsheviks and the Left-Wing of the SR Party would win majority representation in the Soviets for the first time if elections of representatives to the Congress were held.
Despite strong resistance, the Menshevik and SR leadership eventually had to concede under serious political pressure, though they continued to conspire to find ways to prevent revolutionary domination of the Soviet Congress.
Seeing an unparalleled opportunity, Bolshevik leaders worked in the Petrograd Soviet’s MIlitary Revolutionary Committee (MRC) to prepare for the overthrow of the PG. A minority of the Bolsheviks, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, believed that the time was not right to take power and actively resisted the decision of the leadership, announcing the intention of the revolutionaries in the Soviets to overthrow the PG. Nonetheless, The Military Committee with the participation of Bolshevik and Left SR leaders organized to go on the offensive. On November 7th, the MRC called the insurrection and took control of Petrograd. They defeated the PG without a real fight, testifying to the weakness and lack of popularity of the PG.
The 2nd Congress of Soviets started just as the seizure of power was taking place. The Military Revolutionary Committee announced to the Soviet representatives that the Provisional Government had been overthrown and the new purpose of this Congress was to constitute the Soviet government power. Reformist representatives walked out, while the vast majority of the Congress voted for the formation of a Soviet government and proceeded to build the world’s first socialist state.
Over the next few weeks, the Soviet government put out dozens of decrees at lightning speed, totally revolutionizing Russian society and implementing the long-held demands of the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Among the most important decrees were the Decree on Peace which withdrew Russia from the war immediately, the Decree on Land that legalized peasant expropriations and redistribution of the land of the landlords, and the Decree on Workers which put in the most sweeping protections for workers’ rights in history.
To give just a glimpse into the radical programs pursued, the Soviet government decreed:
Despite immense celebrations by the masses, the struggle was anything but over. Though the Soviets threw out the PG in Petrograd without much effort, most of the Russian Empire was still not under Soviet power. The delegates of the 2nd Congress of Soviets returned to their cities and villages and prepared their local Soviets to take power. In hundreds of cities and towns, the Soviets took power without resistance. However, there were deep struggles in some locations, including Moscow, between Soviet forces and the forces of the old order.
The struggle for power in the whole of the Russian Empire between the Soviets and the counter-revolutionary forces ended up being protracted. Not only the ruling classes of Russia, but also world imperialism, colluded to strangle the new Soviet power in the cradle. The Allied Powers, feeling betrayed by the exit of Russia from the War, and the Central Powers, sensing weakness among the Soviet government, invaded the teetering Russian Empire from all sides. Armies from 15 countries invaded Soviet territory to take control of the land and aid the Russian counter-revolutionaries in seizing back their power.
Under this chaos, the struggle between socialism on the one hand and capitalism and imperialism on the other became a concrete reality all across the former Russian Empire. Under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Government constituted a new Red Army to fight the war against the alliance of imperialists, capitalists, and sadly also segments of the reformist Socialist Parties. Despite clear military inferiority — lacking training, weapons, and money — the new Red Army quickly swelled to fight back against the counter-revolution. Millions of workers and peasants, despite their war-weariness, gladly took up arms to bring power to their class.
Encircled and fearing that their days were numbered, the Bolshevik Party, now renamed to the Communist Party, got to work on their even grander plans. The Bolsheviks’ internationalism was absolutely core to their politics, and they saw that the old Socialist International which had betrayed the international working class for the sake of imperialism was absolutely bankrupt.
Their victory inspired workers and peasants all across the world that they too could bring down imperialism and capitalism and build a new just and socialist world. The Communist Party seeked to organize this mass support across the globe by constituting the Communist International in 1919. This new international brought together revolutionaries from all over the world who wanted to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and bring the working class to power in their own countries. This new International galvanized the marginalized revolutionary organizers in other countries to begin the task of organizing a new Communist movement with the purpose of taking power and building world socialism.
The Communists then, just as today’s Communists, were seen by many as delusional idealists with their talk of world socialism and workers’ rule. The Russian Revolution, however, had proven that the lower classes could indeed take power for themselves, and the Communist International made concrete the previously utopian-seeming notion of international revolution.
Pushed forward by the collapse of their own countries due to the World War and inspired by the revolutionary example of Russia, workers and peasants went on the offensive for the next couple of years. Revolutions took place in Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria, Austria, and even Germany, one of the centers of world capitalism and imperialism. The era of the socialist revolution had finally begun.
Surprising everybody, the Soviet Union did not collapse under the weight of counter-revolution or imperialist invasions. Soviet power was consolidated in much of the territory of the former Russian Empire, and a new system was constructed.
Just as surprisingly, the revolutionary wave of 1917-1922 also came to an end without the victory of the working class in countries outside of Russia. The new Soviet government was in an unusual and difficult position. The World War and the Civil War had devastated their economy and society and had led to the deaths of large swathes of the workers who had made the revolution. At the same time, Russian industry had totally collapsed and hundreds of thousands of workers fled back to their old homelands in the countryside. Society was in shambles and unfortunately there were no revolutions coming to the immediate aid of the struggling Soviet state.
With the world revolution postponed to an uncertain future, the Communist Party proceeded to rebuild the territories of the new Soviet Union and focus on how to implement the new system of government in a society lacking the huge industrial development and massive surpluses of the developed capitalist world which Marxists universally recognized as a precondition for the new communist society to spring forth.
Through the 1920s massive struggles took place within the Communist Party and the Soviet government about the future of the Soviet Union. Should there be opening up to some free market policies? When and how should the socialist government industrialize and modernize the country? Should the land be collectived? How should the Communist Party and the Soviet government function in the new society? Should communists prioritize building the international revolutionary movement and risk the ire of the imperialist powers? Or should they focus on national development and “socialism in one country”?
Different policies, factions, and leaders rose and fell in this period of construction of the new order. New, unexpected conflicts and contradictions arose in the fledgling Soviet society. The period of revolution was finished but now a new society had to built.
The October Revolution showed the world that the lower classes could take power and build up a socialist alternative to capitalism. Though today over a century later, all of the gains made in that revolution have been wiped away by counter-revolution and imperialism, the Bolsheviks set a high bar that we must clear if we want to build a better, socialist world. They have provided us with a wealth of theory and political practice that must be studied if we want to learn how to use the methods of Marxism to build on their successes and avoid their mistakes.
The task before us today is no less than the total liberation of mankind from capitalism, imperialism and the racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, exploitation and oppression that those systems depend on. It’s time to learn the hard-fought lessons of the revolutionary movements before us and take the fight of generations of workers before us to its final conclusion: international socialism.