( See Challenge January 15 and January 29, 2025, for the first and second parts of this series: “Part 1: How Bolsheviks Built a Mass Revolutionary Party” - https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/13408-part-1-how-bolsheviks-built-a-mass-revolutionary-party and “Part 2: How Bolsheviks Built Mass Party” - https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/13428-part-2-how-bolsheviks-built-mass-party )
World War I (1914-1918) was triggered by the imperialists' competition to redivide the world. The war would have been less destructive if the socialist Second International had dared to rouse the working class against the warmonger governments. Instead, the European proletarian parties deserted to the side of the imperialists. Only the Bolsheviks of Russia remained faithful to socialism/communism and internationalism. Only the Bolsheviks mounted a civil war against their own imperialist ruling class.
The Capitalist March “Revolution”
In the midst of the war, January 1917 began with a wave of workers’ strikes in Russia. By late February, the strikes spread and became more sharply political. Workers demanded an end to the war and to the Tsarist absolute monarchy.
On March 11, Tsar Nicholas II unleashed the Russian army against the strikers. But one company of soldiers turned their guns around and opened fire on squads of mounted police instead. Rising in revolt, the workers and soldiers arrested tsarist ministers and generals and freed jailed revolutionaries, who promptly joined the revolutionary struggle. Other political prisoners, including Joseph Stalin, returned from exile in Siberia. Stalin went to Petrograd, where he joined the editorial board of Pravda, the Bolshevik daily newspaper.
The Tsar abdicated, ending three centuries of the Romanov bosses’ rule. (The following year, Nicholas and his family were executed). Intoxicated by these early successes, and lulled by the support of the compromising Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, most of the petit bourgeoisie, soldiers, and workers supported the capitalist Provisional Government. It fell to the Bolshevik Party to explain to the masses of workers and soldiers that as long as power remained in the hands of these capitalists, and as long as the Soviets [councils] were dominated by the compromisers, the workers and peasants would secure neither peace nor land nor bread. To achieve complete victory and complete the revolution, power needed to be transferred to the Soviets under communist (Bolshevik) leadership.
On April 4, 1917, one day after returning from exile abroad, Lenin issued his famous April Theses. He called for his Bolshevik Party to seize state power. Six months later, this campaign, which started with only a handful of comrades, would change the face of the earth.
Between March and October 1917, the Bolsheviks accomplished the difficult task of winning over the majority of the working class and the Soviets, and enlisting the support of millions of peasants for the Socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks conducted extensive political work both at the front lines, among the soldiers, and in the rear, to prepare the masses for revolution. The Bolsheviks viewed socialism as a key step toward communism.
The Bolsheviks confronted the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties, the Anarchists, and the other non-communist parties that fought to preserve the capitalist profit system. At the same time, they defeated attempts by capitulators within their own party to deflect them from the path of socialist revolution.
In July 1917, workers rose up against the capitalist Provisional Government. Though Lenin realized the uprising was premature, he insisted that the Bolsheviks support the rebelling workers. The Provisional Government violently suppressed the uprising and outlawed the Bolshevik Party. Lenin went into hiding in Finland. But organizing for revolution never stopped.
Under Bolshevik leadership, the urban working class, in alliance with the poor peasants, and with the support of the soldiers and sailors, overthrew the bourgeoisie and established the power of the Soviets. They set up a new type of state, a Socialist Soviet state. They expropriated the businesses of the capitalists, dispossessed many landlords, started collectivising the country’s land and turning it over to the peasants, withdrew Russia from World War I, and obtained peace—a much-needed respite. Together, these measures created the conditions for the development of Socialist construction.
The Great October Socialist Revolution smashed capitalism, deprived the bourgeoisie of the means of production, and converted much of the mills, factories, land, railways and banks into the public property of the whole people. Throughout the vast country, it established the dictatorship of the proletariat. It made the working class the ruling class.
On the night of November 7, 1917, revolutionary workers, soldiers and sailors stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, arrested the bourgeois Provisional Government, and placed state power in the hands of the Soviets.
Why were the Bolsheviks successful?
There were five significant factors:
- First, the Russian bourgeoisie was weak. They were entangled in World War I, which the masses of Russian workers and peasants soon came to bitterly oppose. After the capitalists gained power in February 1917, workers in Russia saw no essential differences between them and the Tsar.
- Second, workers in Russia had been steeled by revolutionary battle, by the insurrections in 1905 and February 1917 and by the mass working-class strikes and uprisings that began in 1912. The workers in these battles followed the leadership of the Bolsheviks.
- Third, the Bolsheviks understood they could turn imperialist war into civil war. As the Russian rulers focused on the European battleground, they left their internal flank wide open for attack. The Bolsheviks knew to kick the bosses when they were down.
- Fourth, the Bolsheviks built a worker-peasant-soldier alliance. They organized many agricultural workers under their revolutionary leadership, often meeting these agricultural workers for the first time as they were organizing soldiers to turn their guns on their generals
- Fifth, the Bolsheviks won significant portions of the working class and peasantry to the essential concept of revolutionary violence, without which no revolution can succeed.
What was the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution?
Over the decades that followed, it stimulated working class struggles worldwide. Legalized trade unions, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and Social Security were all attempts by U.S. bosses to “save capitalism” through reforms. An enormous international communist movement inspired and led rebellions against imperialists and colonizers around the world. Socialism won out from China to Eastern Europe.
These great advances began to erode and reverse in the 1960s, when Nikita Khrushchev made it clear that the working-class revolution was no longer the program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and whatever world communist movement it still led at that time. The collapse of the Soviet Union—and later of the great Chinese Revolution for communism—led directly to the low level of class struggle in the current period and degraded conditions for the international working class.
And so the most important questions facing the working class of the world are: WHY did the glorious communist movement of the 20th century turn into its opposite? And HOW can the next great revolution have a different outcome?
Note: See the series on the centennial of the Russian Revolution in CHALLENGE in 2017 – 2018. Here are some specific suggestions:
https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/10369-bolshevik-revolution-centennial-series-the-great-insurrectio
https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/10350-bolshevik-revolution-centennial-series-free-at-last-the-worl
https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/10577-bolshevik-revolution-101-workers-took-power-we-can-do-it-aga
https://plp.org/home/challenge-newspaper/13364-bolshevik-revolution-the-epic-black-sea-revolt
https://plp.org/challenge/challenge-13-jun-2018/viewdocument/271 - page 6.
