Strategy of Protest and Revolution 4.0: The Russian Bolshevik Revolution
(Lenin’s Strategy)
Hi, and after yet another long hiatus, welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is the fourth entry in “The Strategy of Protest and Revolution”, where we’ll look at how revolutionary and protest movements achieve success. In particular, we’ll focus on the following questions:
- How do activists turn public discontent into a coordinated movement?
- What do successful movements do to achieve their goals? And
- How have successful strategies changed over time?
In this entry, we’ll be looking at the Russian Bolshevik Revolution from March to November 1917. It’s a long entry, so I’ve split it into two parts, each being its own video. This first part will focus on Lenin’s social movement strategy, or how Lenin planned to bring socialism to Czarist Russia.
I. Introduction
Russia went through 2 revolutions in 1917. First, the February Revolution overthrew Czarist autocracy for a liberal Provisional Government; then, the October Revolution overthrew the Provisional Government for a socialist regime that would later become the Soviet Union. Between these 2 revolutions, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, went from being a small group, to one that could take over Russia’s capital of Petrograd. How did Lenin pull this off?
Let’s first review what social movements are about. A ‘social movement’ harnesses the collective power of ordinary people to impose change upon society. In this, it is resisted by an ‘establishment’ that represents existing interests, and can use the powers of the state – particularly those related to coercion and violence – to maintain said interests.
Against this, movements do 2 things. First, they raise ‘issues’ that encourage the public to participate in the movement; second, they create ‘organizations’ that turn this participation into power: physical, political, and more. Power is what a movement uses to achieve change: either by getting the establishment to negotiate, or by overpowering it entirely in a revolution.
On the surface, Russia in 1917 was fertile ground for a ‘socialist’ movement based around the interests of the lower classes. Decades of minimal socioeconomic reform had created huge resentments amongst the poor: rural peasants were crushed by unrepayable debt, while urban workers slaved in miserable and humiliating conditions. On top of this, Russia’s participation in World War One had ended German imports and disrupted civilian logistics, resulting in soaring inflation, collapsing living conditions and an explosion in political discontent.
Despite this, serious obstacles still stood in the way of socialist success.
II. Problem & Issue 1: Socialism in Russia
The first obstacle to socialist success was establishment state power, especially the Russian secret police with its extensive monitoring and infiltration capabilities. The Bolsheviks developed several responses to state suppression, as we’ll see later, but this was ultimately not enough and by 1917, the movement had been neutralized throughout Russia. Still, evading state power was seen mainly as a matter of practical execution; and it therefore took a back seat to the task of formulating an actual movement strategy.
Which brings us to the second and far more fundamental obstacle: socialism’s unpopularity in 1917 Russia. While many Russians were sick of the Czarist establishment, that didn’t mean that they saw socialism as the solution. In fact, to use our template for social movements, many socialists themselves believed that their ‘Socialist Issue’ would only attract minuscule participation in 1917 Russia, making it impossible to achieve success there.
Briefly and extremely generally, the Socialist Issue was derived from the socioeconomic theories of Karl Marx. It claimed that society had a major problem: the proletariat – meaning people who could only survive through wage work, which under classical Marxism meant urban factory workers – was being ‘exploited’ by the capitalist bourgeoisie, who controlled the wage-paying ‘means of production’ – like factories – and used this control to force the proletariat to work for less than fair wages. To socialists, exploitation was responsible for the worker misery and humiliation that was commonplace at the time.
To end exploitation, the Socialist Issue proposed the following solution: a socialist movement would take over the state, and use its powers to establish proletarian control over the means of production. Socialists argued that this would lead to properly-rewarded work, which would let the proletariat fully contribute to society, and eventually result in a Communist utopia of technological super-progress, material abundance and individual self-realization.
So why was this Socialist Issue unpopular in 1917 Russia? Firstly and straightforwardly, issues that attract the public need to be relevant to their concerns, and the Socialist Issue wasn’t that. Classical Marxism focused on the exploitation of the urban factory worker, who in 1917 Russia made up only 2% of the population. It had little to say to the rural peasant majority and drove away all but the most idealistic bourgeoisie.
What’s more, socialists believed that their issue, as of 1917, wouldn’t even attract that 2% of the proletariat. This was because socialism had – and has – a real difficulty demonstrating its relevance to the lower classes, especially against competing narratives. Why should workers blame ‘capitalist exploitation’ for unfair wages, instead of immigration or automation? Why is a better life only possible through ‘seizing the means of production’, instead of – say – voting for bread and circuses?
There are many ways to interpret this difficulty; crucially for socialists, they did so by developing the concept of ‘class consciousness’. The practical effect of this idea is that workers can’t immediately embrace socialism, because they start off with ‘low consciousness’ and therefore have a naïve view of capitalism: for example, they believe that their misery comes from a ‘bad boss’ and simply replacing him will solve everything. But as workers experience repeated boss changes without improvement, they will start to appreciate that the problem goes beyond any one bad boss, and instead involves a system that keeps putting bad bosses in charge. This eventually leads to ‘high consciousness’ workers who understand that their misery does not come from any one bad boss, but from a system that rewards bad bosses with wealth. Only now will they find the appeal of the Socialist Issue and its proposed solution.
So to get a large socialist movement, there must first be a high consciousness proletariat. But as seen above, for a proletariat to become high consciousness, it must first be subject to extensive capitalist exploitation. As such, classical Marxism argued that socialist movements would only develop after a certain stage of socioeconomic development, namely when society becomes dominated by the capitalist bourgeoisie and its political ideology, liberalism.
By 1917, most socialists agreed that developed Europe, especially Germany, was liberal and capitalist enough to have large and viable movements. By contrast, despite rapid industrialization, Russia was still seen as non-capitalist and illiberal; so most socialists assumed that its proletariat would be too proportionally small and low consciousness to participate effectively in socialism. This meant that any movement there would be minuscule and therefore powerless against the Czarist establishment.
Classical Marxism had no answer for this, except to wait for socioeconomic development. In this way, the ideology actually has no place for a strategy of protest and revolution. In the words of Engels: ‘revolutions are not made deliberately and arbitrarily but… are the necessary consequence of circumstances’.
III. Issue 2: Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks & Bolsheviks
Classical Marxism saw no hope for socialism in 1917 Russia, but of course that didn’t stop activists from trying. Ultimately, they coalesced into three main groups, each proposing a solution that would let a minuscule socialist movement overpower the Czarist establishment.
The first group was the Social Revolutionary Party, or SRs. Recognizing that most of Russia’s population were peasants, the SRs proposed to bring them into the movement. As such, they redefined ‘proletariat’ to include peasants alongside urban factory workers. This went against classical Marxism, partly because many peasants owned a ‘means of production’ in the form of land, and partly because peasants were seen as stubbornly low consciousness.
Even less Marxist was how the SRs sealed this political coalition, by promising to redistribute aristocratic and even state land to the peasants! Nevertheless, peasant support gave the SRs the largest following out of the three, not just in the countryside but also in industrial cities with large migrant populations.
The second group was the ‘Menshevik’ faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. They largely followed classical Marxism, both in focusing on the urban factory worker, and in the assessment that said workers were still low consciousness. Their solution was, therefore, to raise consciousness by promoting Russia’s socioeconomic development – which meant letting the capitalist bourgeoisie further exploit the proletariat!
Nevertheless, this meant that the Mensheviks would team up with well-funded bourgeois movements who also wanted to overpower the Czarist establishment, albeit for liberal rather than socialist change. By riding on their coattails, the Mensheviks hoped to acquire goodwill or even power, which they could then use to achieve some socialism within Russia.
Then, there was the ‘Bolshevik’ faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party – the group headed by Lenin. Like the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks also focused on the urban factory worker and their current low consciousness. But unlike them and contrary to classical Marxism, the Bolsheviks did not believe that socioeconomic development was the only way to raise consciousness.
Instead, Lenin argued that, rather than waiting for workers to become disillusioned with capitalism, a movement could artificially and prematurely raise their consciousness. If done right, that meant workers would become high consciousness without first needing liberal regimes or mass industrialization.
In other words, a socialist revolution could happen in Czarist Russia right now. And in choosing this approach, Lenin would revolutionize movement strategy forever.
IV. Grand Strategy: Mass Agitation
At first glance, the Bolshevik proposal to artificially raise consciousness might seem like just another heretical interpretation of Marx. In fact, what they proposed was a completely different movement grand strategy.
Earlier, we said that movements do 2 things: raise issues to promote public participation, and create organizations to convert participation into power. From this, we can derive 3 movement grand strategies: 1 focused purely on issues, 1 purely on organization, and 1 combining the 2. For this entry, we’ll be focusing on the first and third grand strategies.
What the SRs and Mensheviks were doing was the issue-focused grand strategy, known as the ‘Spontaneous Uprising’. In it, a movement finds an issue so appealing to the public that they participate in droves, forming a sheer weight of numbers that overpowers establishment resistance. As the Socialist Issue was not attractive enough to do this in 1917 Russia, the SRs and Mensheviks had to partner with other movements to achieve the necessary size – the peasants for the SRs, the bourgeoisie for the Mensheviks. Such partnerships inevitably diluted the change that these socialists hoped to bring to society, but they felt they had no other choice.
To an ideologue like Lenin, diluting socialism was abhorrent, and so copying the SR or Menshevik partnerships was a non-starter. But that meant that the Bolsheviks needed an alternative pathway towards movement success: after all, the only way a Spontaneous Uprising can win is through sheer size, because the typical participant will not sacrifice very much for a cause, and therefore will not generate much power. Large numbers can still multiply this into something establishment-threatening, but Lenin was now rejecting this because of ideological purity. So what was his solution?
Lenin’s solution began with the profound industrial-age insight that a movement didn’t have to accept everything within its environment as fixed. Like everything in strategy, environmental factors will always limit a movement’s potential: for example, the public will only find certain issues relevant, and participants will only generate so much power. The small proletariat and their lack of consciousness were, of course, major environmental constraints on socialism in 1917 Russia.
The SR and Menshevik strategies worked within these limits. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, believed that said limits could be manipulated, and that industrial technology made this task easier than ever before: for example, by manipulating information through propaganda, an issue can become relevant to participants who wouldn’t have ‘naturally’ cared before.
Here, Lenin believed that he could manipulate consciousness growth within the Russian proletariat, and in so doing, prematurely mold them into exceptionally-committed participants, ready to make the large sacrifices necessary for powerful actions, up to and including socialist revolution. If done right, the small Bolshevik movement would generate a power vastly larger than its size, freeing it from the need to partner with non-socialists in order to achieve success.
To manipulate effectively, the Bolsheviks would need a level of coordination and effort higher than mere individual initiative, and so Lenin saw the need to organize participants in order to direct their actions. This conscious use of organization to manipulate the environment is a core theme of Lenin’s strategy; but at the same time, Lenin still saw limits to its use, if only because organizations cost resources. Lenin wasn’t out to manipulate everything, just the consciousness of the proletariat, who were at least considered latent followers of the Socialist Issue. The Bolsheviks weren’t trying to convert non-proletarians, nor were they actively organizing for a rebellion. The point was to raise proletarian consciousness to such an extent that they would see the need for revolution and carry it out themselves.
Lenin’s combination of organization and issue resulted in a new grand strategy, which this video series has called ‘Mass Agitation’. Under Mass Agitation, a movement uses organization to boost the power generated from existing participants, sometimes by coordinating or leading action, other times – as the Bolsheviks did here – by increasing their level of commitment. If done right, Mass Agitations can win without achieving large amounts of support: not only can this be easier, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows a movement to maintain ideological purity.
Next, we turn to how Lenin saw Mass Agitation working in practice.
V. Action: Agitation
Under a grand strategy of Mass Agitation, Lenin theorized that his Bolshevik movement could grow in power by using organized manipulation to artificially raise proletarian consciousness. Now, it was time to apply theory to reality.
In considering how to raise consciousness, Lenin could have drawn from a homemade tradition: modern political terrorism. In the 1870s, a few Russian proto-socialists saw peasant revolution as the way to achieve utopia, and like their socialist descendants, were frustrated at the peasants’ lack of interest. Similar to the logic of class consciousness, these proto-socialists believed that the peasants could be ‘inspired’ into revolt, and so they launched terrorist attacks to provide that ‘inspiration’ as well as practical guidance.
Lenin was not impressed by the results. Despite some significant successes – including the assassination of a Czar – the peasant revolution never materialized. That was enough for many Bolsheviks to doubt the usefulness of terrorism; but even if it had generated consciousness growth, a movement would still have had to conduct a sustained campaign in order to ‘inspire’ the peasants up to revolution. And this was near-impossible, given that terrorism always triggered the full suppression of the Czarist state.
Instead, Lenin opted for a more low-key action that he expected would be less provocative and therefore more sustainable: ‘Agitation’. In a way, agitation is not very different from that social movement cliché, ‘Raising Awareness’, but with the big caveat that under socialism, aware and conscious workers inevitably revolt against the establishment.
Good agitation is largely indistinguishable from good propaganda, public relations, advertising or anything else in the persuasive arts. Lenin advised activists to focus on ‘kitchen-table issues’, seize the news cycle, establish emotional connections, and reinforce commitment by giving interested people entry-level tasks. The Bolsheviks also ‘politicized’ identities by linking them to socialism: notably, by asserting that women and colonized peoples were also victims of exploitation.
But ultimately, activists had to remember that the goal was not charity, but to get the proletariat to overpower the establishment. As an example, while it might have been a good idea to use child labor as an emotional example of capitalist exploitation, the correct agitative response was probably not to promise a quick fix within the capitalist system; but instead, to stress that only under socialism could child labor truly be fixed.
Agitation was to be conducted using existing methods: primarily face-to-face conversations and newspapers, several of which Lenin founded. Through them, the Bolsheviks hoped to manipulate information in such a way as to ‘awaken’ the Russian worker to the true nature of capitalist exploitation, thereby creating the high consciousness proletariat required for movement victory. But as mentioned earlier, in order for the Bolsheviks to agitate effectively, they first had to be organized properly, which is what Lenin now focused his attention on.
VI. Organization: The Vanguard Party
In order to get the proletariat to join the Bolshevik movement, Lenin proposed using agitation to raise their consciousness; and in order to agitate effectively, Lenin proposed to do it in an organized manner, with specific structures guiding and coordinating the actions of individual participants. This was the genesis for one of Lenin’s more famous creations: the ‘Vanguard Party’.
Despite the above logic, Lenin did not prioritize action effectiveness when considering the structure of his vanguard organization. This made sense from his perspective: since socialism was inevitable, a movement that agitated poorly would merely delay things. Lenin’s real fear was that his movement would deviate from his own uncompromising interpretation of Marx, resulting in a socialism that was quote-unquote ‘corrupted’ by liberal capitalism.
Lenin’s fear was not an idle one: ever since their appearance, socialist movements have been tempted to politically compromise with liberal capitalism in return for material benefits. The British Labour Party was furthest along in this regard, but to Lenin, the worst ‘betrayal’ came from Europe’s leading socialist movement, which was Germany’s Social Democratic Party or SPD.
Briefly summarizing, in the early 1900s, the SPD was made up of two halves: the movement activists in the political Party, and the actual proletariat in the trade unions. At first, the Party claimed to speak for both, when it rejected Bismarck’s attempt to subvert socialism with his own welfare policy. The Party’s position angered the trade unions, who stood to benefit from welfare; eventually, the unions demanded leadership over the SPD, claiming that they were the true voice of the proletariat. Unable to resist this logic, the activists caved – and immediately, the union-led SPD began to compromise with the German establishment, not only renouncing revolution and strike action, but also supporting establishment nationalism and colonialism. This culminated in World War One, with the SPD voting to support what Lenin saw as a ‘capitalist’ war.
To Lenin, the SPD’s failure revealed the tendency of both proletariat and Party to deviate towards liberal capitalism. Famously, he chastised the proletariat as having, at best, a ‘trade union consciousness’, which meant that they would always compromise with liberal capitalism in return for material benefits. Party members, on the other hand, were vulnerable to being seduced by liberal political logic: whether through the promise of incremental reforms under capitalism or, like in the SPD’s case, through calls to accept the ‘democratic will’ of a heretical proletariat.
Lenin organized his vanguard to prevent these two tendencies from perverting his vision, and the result has determined the structure of Leninist parties to this day. First, Lenin split the socialist movement into two tiers: the ‘mass movement’ consisting of the regular proletariat, and the ‘vanguard party’ consisting of movement activists. This is sometimes seen as a defense against suppression, where the mass movement would provide support openly yet anonymously, while the vanguard would do the specialized and risky work of agitation. But the main reason was to keep decisionmaking out of the proletariat and within a small activist elite that could be better vetted for ideological purity.
And Lenin intended to vet these activists thoroughly, by demanding that they become full-time ‘professional revolutionaries’ solely dedicated to the socialist movement. Again, there were security reasons for this: professionals could perform tasks more efficiently and were better prepared for state suppression. But the main reason was that full-time activists would live their whole lives within the vanguard and would therefore be fully immersed within the socialist bubble, with little outside contact to challenge their worldview.
Of course, even the most professional activists could lose faith, so Lenin developed a structural safeguard against them: what would often ironically be known as ‘Democratic Centralism’. Democratic centralism is a top-down hierarchy where the lower entities must follow the decisions of the higher leadership: technically, the latter are held in check by the former through regular elections, but in practice the higher leadership can override this by deciding who can join the lower entities. In any case, Lenin was not interested in checking power, but in checking ideology; with this circular arrangement, he hoped to perpetuate his vision by placing like-minded people in the lower entities, who in turn would do the same when picking Lenin’s successors.
Lastly, even before 1917, critics predicted that all these structures would turn Lenin’s vanguard party into a self-contained nomenklatura class, utterly divorced from the proletariat it claimed to represent. Lenin’s answer to this was simple: make the vanguard the only organization allowed to represent the proletariat! Vanguards must not tolerate any parallel organization, no matter how friendly or aligned; they must either assume firm control over the latter or, failing that, undermine their credibility or even existence. Lenin’s main targets here were the trade unions that had led the SPD astray, but the same logic applied to rival movements, leaders and in the extreme, most forms of societal organization; so in a sense, this ‘simple answer’ would serve to justify the entire system of Communist totalitarianism.
In summary, Lenin didn’t organize his vanguard for agitation efficiency, but instead to perpetuate his version of Marxism. His emphasis on ideological vetting and rejecting outside influence inevitably came at some cost to his vanguard’s ability to act properly, but its success can be seen in the fact that Marxism-Leninism continues to be a dominant strand within socialism – which is an infamously fractious ideology – to this day.
VII. Conclusion (for this Part)
The major problem facing Russian socialism in 1917 was its small and uncommitted proletariat, which made it impossible for a socialist movement to overpower the Czarist establishment by itself; Lenin ramped up the difficulty by ruling out the obvious solution, which was to partner with non-socialists. Instead, he created a vanguard that would use organized action to manipulate the informational environment, which he hoped would agitate the proletariat into revolution. Throughout it all, Lenin’s priority remained on keeping ideological purity, even at the cost of action efficiency. This general thinking would serve Lenin and his Bolsheviks well, as they sought power within revolutionary Russia.
Despite the topic of this video, one of my intentions in discussing Lenin’s strategy is to divorce his logic –and especially his insights on organization – from the ideology of socialism and its subset Communism. It would be wrong to assume that all this can only happen on the Left: certain nativists and Islamists also yearn for a ‘consciousness awakening’ amongst the masses, while it’s been noted that Lenin’s vanguard ironically resembles religious and especially Christian organization, unsurprising given the aversion both groups have to ideological heresy.
It would also be wrong to assume Lenin’s strategic logic became obsolete with the fall of Soviet Communism: in fact, they might have become more relevant than ever before. Behind all this talk about agitation, vanguardism and the like, is the fundamental insight that industrial-age technology allows humans to manipulate the environment – and each other – with reasonable ease and accuracy; such technology has only advanced since 1917 and is unlikely to ever be forgotten. In such an environment, the public’s ability to do rational cost-benefit analysis will constantly be warped by establishment or third-party manipulation, which means that for social movements, the only pathway to success might be to manipulate back and better. Needless to say, this Orwellian development will have major ramifications for modern politics and even society in general.
But as of 1917, all this was a distant dream, as far as Lenin was concerned. For all his movement strategy, the fact remained that the Bolshevik movement still hadn’t amassed the power needed to overpower the Czarist state. For now, Lenin could only focus on mundane tasks, such as finding funding for his vanguard organization: mostly idealistic donations, Stalin’s bank robberies, and – rumor has it – German gold. There was nothing else to do but wait and hope for something to happen.
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Thanks for watching the video, especially after this hiatus, and please give a like and subscribe. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section.
