Strategy of Protest and Revolution 4.5: The Russian Bolshevik Revolution
(Mar-Nov 1917)
Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is the second part of the fourth entry in ‘The Strategy of Protest and Revolution’, which will focus on the actual progress of the Russian Revolution and how the Bolshevik movement ultimately emerged victorious in this multilayered contest.
I. Introduction
First, let’s quickly recap how Lenin and his Bolshevik movement planned to impose socialist change upon 1917 Russia. The problem they faced was that their support base of the proletariat – defined mainly as urban factory workers – was too small and uncommitted to overpower the Czarist establishment.
Unlike other socialist factions, who sought to amass a weight of numbers by partnering with large non-socialist factions, Lenin’s solution was to create a ‘Vanguard Party’ that would agitate the proletariat to make exceptional sacrifices and generate great power for the cause, including revolution. Lenin also organized his vanguard to keep to his version of socialism, no matter the broader political environment.
With this strategy, Lenin hoped to obtain power without involving anybody outside the proletariat, thereby ensuring that the result was quote-unquote ‘real’ socialism. This meant that in 1917, the Bolsheviks would be making the attempt with, at best, about 2% of the population. But in their defense, much of this 2% was strategically concentrated in the big cities, particularly the capital of Petrograd, giving them a disproportionate power against the establishment. Lenin also tried to expand his support base by heretically declaring that ‘poor peasants’ were also part of the proletariat, but this was of limited effect as the Bolsheviks had little presence within Russia’s peasantry anyway.
Despite Lenin’s efforts, the Bolsheviks enjoyed only limited success before 1917. Granted, they had a reputation of being a fringe but well-organized movement, and had played a substantial role in previous anti-Czarist unrest. But the establishment ultimately suppressed them by deploying large amounts of state power, particularly the secret police: by 1917, most Bolshevik leaders were either in foreign or Siberian exile, with Lenin unable to contact anyone within Russia for months at a time. 2 members of the Bolshevik leadership were even found to be Czarist agents!
It was within this context that Lenin saw Russia’s participation in World War One as a ‘Window of Opportunity’. While war patriotism temporarily reduced proletarian support for the Bolsheviks, war also distracted and weakened the suppressive powers of the Czarist state. The bar for a socialist takeover therefore began to lower; in the meantime Lenin would observe and wait for the right moment to strike.
II. The February Revolution
By 1917, the Czarist establishment was teetering on the brink, discredited by mismanagement at home and on the battlefield. The Germans were deep within Russian territory, prices had doubled since the War, bread was being rationed, and a hundred Petrograd factories were illegally striking. A serious conspiracy to remove the Czar was underway, and both secret police and foreign allies braced themselves – in the latter case, not entirely unhappily – for imminent political change.
All this, however, was lost on the few socialist leaders still free within Russia, who continued to believe that the populace would back their Czar. So when anti-Czarist demonstrations began to erupt in force, the local Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd banned its members from joining. The latter went anyway.
By early March, Petrograd was being rocked by protests of up to 200 thousand people. The government sent in the Cossacks to suppress them, but the troops instead joined the demonstrators. Even now, the Petrograd Bolsheviks continued to tell their members to stand down, fearing that the discontent was merely an urban affair and that the peasants – especially those serving in nearby armies – weren’t sympathetic. This was a valid worry, but within days even Petrograd’s elite Guards Division had defected, bringing with them full control over Russia’s capital. Too demoralized to resist, the Czar abdicated and the Czarist establishment collapsed.
With no more opposition, the socialist movement had an opportunity to seize the state and impose socialism upon Russia. A few Bolsheviks did go down this route, proposing what would be known as the Petrograd Soviet, or PS, as a prelude to a full Russian government. But they remained fringe voices, and were soon drowned out by the two significantly larger factions that dominated the PS: the Mensheviks, and the Social Revolutionaries or SRs.
As mentioned, these two factions had a different strategy for movement success than the Bolsheviks. While the latter sought victory by cultivating a small but extraordinarily-committed proletarian base, the Mensheviks and SRs aimed to win by gaining mass support. And since it was impossible to achieve mass support solely off the 2% of Russians in the proletariat, both factions partnered with non-proletarian movements: the wealthy bourgeois capitalists for the Mensheviks, the vast peasantry for the SRs.
In making such deals, both factions accepted that their non-proletarian partners would be the ones with most of the power; therefore it was the latter’s agenda who would be enacted. As such, the Mensheviks, in particular, allowed the bourgeois movement to assume control of the Russian state, resulting in the liberal Provisional Government or PG that would govern Russia until a postwar constitutional settlement was reached. The PS would retain some authority over the proletariat, but otherwise it was happy to let the bourgeoisie impose liberal capitalism over Russian society. All this was in line with Classical Marxist theory which saw 1917 Russia as ripe for liberal, not socialist revolution.
The February Revolution is an example of what this video series has called a ‘Spontaneous Uprising’ grand strategy, where a movement uses a hot-button issue to rally the public, create a weight of numbers and then overpower the establishment. This is what the Mensheviks hoped to achieve, when they compromised on their socialism and pivoted towards the issue of anti-Czarism, which allowed them to establish a common front with the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, this move achieved results that would have been impossible with Menshevik or SR strength alone; on the other, it also conceded the future of Russia to the bourgeoisie and to liberalism.
To Lenin, the February Revolution confirmed all his fears regarding the future of socialism under such a ‘Spontaneous Uprising’. Because the Mensheviks and SRs were not interested in organizing the proletariat, they were ultimately put in a position where their only path to victory lay in enlisting non-proletarian movements and diluting socialism in the process. In particular, their lack of organization left them defenseless before the ideological manipulation of the bourgeoisie, causing both socialist activists and proletariat to underestimate their own potential, while inflating the bourgeoisie’s financial and political power. The outcome re-confirmed the importance of sticking with Bolshevik strategy.
It's important to emphasize that the Bolsheviks saw socialist ‘failure’ as being both the fault of the leadership and the proletariat. It was the Mensheviks and SRs within the PS, of course, that chose to hand power over to the PG, but the proletariat also did not resist their decision. This insight is important because, in the wake of the February Revolution, the Russian proletariat also achieved an independent power.
Left to their own devices during the chaos, many within the proletariat began to manage their environment by organizing into autonomous groups or soviets. At their peak, the number of soviets was prodigious: a worker could simultaneously belong to a borough soviet, a factory soviet, a small district union and a larger trade union, not to mention the overarching Petrograd and all-Russian soviets! Soldiers, sailors and peasants also had their own separate web of soviets.
Despite the later Bolshevik appropriation of the name, the ideological content of these soviets was initially very low, being comprised of people who, at best, had minimal contact with Marxism. They elected people based not on politics, but on popularity and prestige, and they believed initially not in class struggle, but in nation and religion. In Lenin’s eyes, this made them part of a ‘low consciousness’ proletariat, wholly uncommitted to socialism and highly susceptible to liberal capitalist influence. For his vision to succeed, they – and their soviets – also had to be brought under the Bolshevik heel.
Lenin characterized the period between the February and October Revolutions as one of ‘Dual Power’, with both the liberal PG and the Menshevik PS being establishments that shared control over the Russian state. This characterization is propaganda, for it implied that the proletariat would necessarily follow the direction of whoever controlled the PS. In fact, the situation in 1917 Russia is better described as ‘Triple Power’, where independent soviets had the power to resist any diktat locally, whether from the PG or PS. For the Bolsheviks to fully impose their views upon Russian society, it wasn’t enough to merely overpower the socialist establishment, take over the PS and then use it to overpower the liberal establishment of the PG. They also needed to overpower the inclinations of the local soviets to forge their own path, and ultimately extinguish their independence and bring them under Bolshevik rule.
III. Mar-Apr: A Strategy of Chaos
In the quest to overpower the Triple Powers of the PS, PG and the local soviets, Lenin’s Bolsheviks started out with several advantages. The first was the total disappearance of Czarist suppression which, as one of the more targeted movements, the Bolsheviks disproportionately benefited from. Secondly, Lenin’s vanguard strategy gave the Bolsheviks a clear blueprint for success, allowing them to clearly identify targets and objectives, and not be blinded by idealism. This was more than could be said for other movements, and especially the other socialist factions.
In any case, the post-February environment had everybody scrambling to reorient themselves. With Lenin still in Switzerland, the Bolsheviks were initially led by the returning Siberian exiles, chief amongst them Stalin. Stalin correctly saw the new circumstances as a huge Window of Opportunity and focused on keeping it open for as long as possible, in order to give the Bolsheviks all the time they needed to implement their strategy. That meant two things: firstly, ensuring that the PG wouldn’t restart suppression, and secondly, ensuring that the Bolsheviks could conduct the action that they wanted.
To achieve this, Stalin came up with a paradoxical solution: using the liberated socialist press, he called on the Bolsheviks to support the PG and establish full freedom over Russia – which, to Stalin and Lenin, meant abolishing the Czarist secret police, army and even bureaucracy, while giving urban workers full rights to act and organize – or rather, to be acted upon and organized by the Bolsheviks.
But when it came to actually conducting Bolshevik action, Stalin made decisions that would haunt him for the rest of his career. Seeking to grow the Bolsheviks as quickly as possible, Stalin adjusted Bolshevik issues to better align with worker sentiments: most notably, he followed the renewed patriotic mood and justified Russia’s continued participation in World War One, despite Lenin’s denunciation of that war as ‘capitalist’. He also rejected Lenin’s call to nationalize agricultural land, fearing that this would unleash rural chaos and exacerbate urban food shortages.
In Stalin’s defense, most of his comrades shared his views. But it didn’t matter, because when Lenin returned to Petrograd in early April, he immediately insisted that the Bolsheviks return to ideological purity. In his famous ‘April Theses’, Lenin denounced all compromises on his vision as deviations towards liberal capitalism. Bolshevik issues would remain the same no matter the broader political environment: the Party would wholly denounce the War and advocate for the nationalization of rural land. Most importantly, it would continue to oppose the liberal PG and the Menshevik and SR establishment of the PS, seeking to overpower all of them and establish a pure socialist state. And finally, Lenin also made a small change, one that he had planned for ever since European socialists, to his anger, voted for World War One: he would rename the Bolsheviks into the Russian Communist Party.
Lenin’s proposals horrified his comrades, who feared – correctly – that such declarations would mark the Bolsheviks out as unpatriotic, divisive, anarchistic and dangerous, inviting proletarian rejection and PG suppression. But behind Lenin’s seeming madness lay a particularly sharp method: remember that the core idea of his strategy was that the public should be manipulated to adopt Bolshevik issues, rather than the other way round. Agitation had been his proposed way of achieving this, but that consumed scarce resources and was best reserved for specific targets. Lenin now proposed another method that could shift the general proletariat towards the Bolsheviks: chaos.
Under Classical Marxism, liberal capitalist rule will inevitably fail to improve proletarian lives; and once the latter recognizes this, they will inevitably be driven towards revolutionary socialism. Marx intended this process to be a gradual one; but Lenin, as usual, proposed to accelerate it through organized action. If the Bolsheviks could undermine liberal capitalist government and make it fail, then the proletariat would not only reject bourgeois rule, but also the socialist leadership of the bourgeois-leaning Mensheviks and SRs. The Bolsheviks would seize both the PS and the PG almost overnight.
So by April 1917, the general Bolshevik strategy for overcoming ‘Triple Power’ was largely confirmed, and was encapsulated in their primary slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Under it, the Bolsheviks would seek to control, or at least ally with the local soviets, and use their power to overpower the establishments of first the socialist PS and then the liberal PG.
To this end, ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was a very attractive slogan for the Bolsheviks to use when actively agitating, selling or introducing their movement to the urban workers. But its more important effect was a passive one: by declaring ‘All Power to the Soviets’, the Bolsheviks demanded that local soviets be the final deciders of all policy, making it impossible for the PS and PG to exert any control on a local level: in fact, the Bolsheviks even established soviets that took responsibility away from the PS itself! Even the independent soviets themselves were not immune from attack: the Bolsheviks pushed for them to accurately reflect proletarian will, which meant that the latter were constantly subject to elections and votes of confidence.
The result was chaos. With power devolved to the local soviets, the governing capacity of the PG and PS disappeared, but their perceived responsibility over events did not. As it turned out, the local soviets also proved unable to govern, hamstrung by constant elections and overlapping jurisdictions. Even in the Russian military, where each division or ship had its own soviet, that technically followed an army or fleet soviet, which in turn had an uneasy relationship with the officer hierarchy, functionality was only maintained through ad-hoc agreements, and a trust that eroded as time went on. The situation in the factories and farms was even more unworkable, and in many cases, production simply stopped.
Contrary to initial expectations, Russia after the February Revolution slid further into defeat and hardship, and as workers grew even hungrier and angrier, the once-extreme ideology of the Bolsheviks must have seemed more and more like the real solution.
IV. May-Oct: Organizing Revolution
The Bolsheviks now had a general strategy: to use the slogan of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ to undermine both the PS and PG establishments, creating chaos that would drive both the proletariat and the local soviets to follow the Bolshevik goal of socialist revolution.
Before 1917, Lenin envisaged the result to be a great uprising, with the ‘elemental destructive force’ of the entire proletariat sweeping everything away. When it came to the actual event, however, Lenin focused on a few groups within the proletariat whom he believed were more useful for revolution. Part of this was common sense – soldiers, for example, could contribute significant military power – and part of this reflected the limited Bolshevik reach: throughout this period, their presence within the countryside remained limited and they found it difficult to do anything there.
Bolshevik action occurred amid the general backdrop of rising proletarian support, as the movement introduced itself to workers and Russia’s chaos deepened. Between February and April, the movement grew from about 3 thousand participants to 80 thousand: impressive numbers, but this was out of a total worker population of 3 million, and by this time there really was no cost to becoming a Bolshevik. So Lenin’s ideas were distinctly a minority view still, as he himself recognized in his April Theses.
The way these participants were distributed already reflected Bolshevik priorities for revolution. Unlike the Mensheviks and SRs who drew significantly from light industries like textiles, the Bolsheviks focused especially on heavy industry like steel, coal, and transport: there were large-scale and frankly masculine industries that could provide the mass strength needed for an uprising. They were also concentrated in strategic points within the Russian Empire: the Urals, the Donbass, Moscow and above all, the capital Petrograd. This put key economic and political targets within striking distance of Bolshevik power.
The Bolsheviks took advantage of the lenient post-February environment to organize these participants in a way that would generate military power. The most notable attempt would be the 30-thousand-strong militia of the Red Guards, but they were a PS initiative and therefore at this stage, controlled by the socialist establishment. Lenin got around this by, yet again, getting Bolshevik-aligned soviets to establish their own parallel institution of worker or factory militias, which would only answer to him.
That said, the best sources of military power obviously came from the military soviets, and so the Bolsheviks prioritized resources on them. Two groups, in particular, were of crucial use in seizing Petrograd: first were the peasant-soldier soviets within the armies of the Northern Front, currently holding off the Germans in Latvia. Given the Bolshevik weakness with peasants and patriotism, controlling them was more of a stretch goal than a realistic prospect as of early 1917.
Second and more realistically were the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, who due to the technical nature of their work were more educated and therefore felt more oppressed by the Czarist system. Some of the bloodiest confrontations of the February Revolution happened there, as sailors took advantage to exact violent revenge on unpopular officers. Sailor soviets of course contributed less land power than soldier ones, but it was better than nothing and so right off the bat, Lenin sent his most experienced activist cadres to their bases in Finland, Estonia and especially the naval fortress of Kronstadt.
Within a month of its inception, Bolshevik strategy began to bear fruit, as the proletariat began to complain that nothing had really improved or even changed since the February Revolution. In late April, the liberal PG tactlessly revealed that Russia’s goals in World War One remained imperialist; the resulting blowback led to a new round of proletarian protests, strikes and army mutinies. To calm things down, the Mensheviks and SRs agreed to bolster the PG by joining it. This was an unwise decision that made them responsible for nothing except the accelerating economic crisis, as factories shut down and peasants seized land. It also made them responsible for the futile attempts by the PG to re-establish control, including reinforcing property rights in the face of proletarian seizures, new censorship and anti-strike regulations, and the attempted punishment of mutineers.
The cluelessness of the Mensheviks and SRs extended to their own socialist movement, as they idealistically followed Bolshevik calls to cede power to local soviets, instead of reinforcing their authority over them. A major opportunity was lost in June, when the need to coordinate the soviets on a national scale led to the creation of multiple soviet federations, most notably the all-Russian Congress of Soviets. However, the actual control exerted by these institutions proved to be very limited, because subordinate soviets were still allowed to decide and act in whatever way they saw fit! As a result, these federations did little to stem the rising Bolshevik tide, and in fact accelerated it as the election of federation delegates created another opportunity for the Bolsheviks to assume leadership over soviets.
To be fair, the Bolsheviks also made their share of mistakes, mostly due to rash and premature action. To be sure, Lenin ultimately wanted to overthrow the PG, but he also didn’t want to provoke it before the Bolsheviks had fully built up their power, especially within the military. In this context, the rash actions of radical sailors, especially at Kronstadt, was a constant thorn in his side. This began in May, when the fortress declared that it would no longer obey the PG. This led to universal condemnation, and Lenin was forced to publicly disavow the actions of his own activists there.
More seriously, mass protests against the PG broke out in July, and once again Kronstadt rushed to join the demonstrations, calling for the Congress of Soviets to depose the PG in the process. This time Lenin failed to stop their action, and the result was a predictable setback. The protests turned violent during the so-called ‘July Days’, and both the PG and PS used that as a pretext to crack down on the Bolsheviks, claiming that the latter were being paid by Germany. As with most of the PG’s actions, this move was ineffective, as Lenin and his comrades simply moved to places beyond government control like Kronstadt and Finland, but their activity within Russia proper was certainly curtailed.
If the July Days represented a partial establishment victory, then whatever gains it made were utterly reversed in mid-September, during Kornilov’s march on Petrograd. Kornilov was the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army, and it’s not clear whether his march was meant to help the PG consolidate control over the capital, or whether he intended a full counter-revolution. In any case, both the PG and the moderate socialist establishments reacted in the worst way possible, with the liberals of the PG resigning as if in league with Kornilov, while the latter initially tried to play down the danger. The proletariat was unconvinced: mobilizing the Red Guards, they harassed, blocked and encouraged the defection of Kornilov’s army. Kornilov ultimately could not proceed and his march failed.
To the remaining unradicalized proletariat, the Kornilov Affair fully discredited the liberal establishment of the PG and the socialist establishment of the Mensheviks and SRs. This led to a veritable wave in favor of the Bolsheviks: by late September, their movement had tripled to 240 thousand participants, bringing with them control over a majority of the worker soviets and also the PS, now led by Trotsky. Critically, the military soviets also began to turn Bolshevik: the Estonian and Finnish naval bases now joined Kronstadt, with the armies of the Northern Front not far behind. The Bolsheviks now had everything needed for revolution; all that was left was to pull the trigger.
V. The October Revolution
Having agitated the proletariat into a revolutionary mood, the Bolsheviks by late September had successfully sidelined the Mensheviks and SRs, and were now in control of a huge swathe of industrial territory, anchored by Moscow and especially Petrograd. This was not the whole of Russia, but it was its political and economic heart, and that was good enough for Lenin to launch his ultimate bid for victory. By contrast, the liberal and moderate socialist establishment of the PG was broken and demoralized, with its final attempts to avert disaster – such as its sudden acceptance of land reform, or its attempt to flee Petrograd for Moscow – only serving to further anger the proletariat and accelerate its demise.
In mid-October, Lenin returned to Petrograd and immediately called for all the soviets – who by this time largely followed Bolshevik leadership – to prepare for socialist revolution. In truth, Lenin had wanted to act almost immediately after the PS flipped: he was even willing to drop his act of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and cynically replace it with his real intention, ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Poorer Peasantry’. Opposing this was the counter-proposal of a few moderate Bolsheviks, who argued – rather idealistically – that with the proletariat and their soviets now on board, armed revolution was no longer necessary and the movement could win ‘legally’ by calling – and winning – the constitutional referendum that the PG had promised way back in the February Revolution.
Ultimately, it fell to Trotsky to devise a compromise that would both preserve the fiction of proletarian initiative while guaranteeing that the Bolsheviks seized power: under the slogan of ‘All Power to the Soviets’, the Bolsheviks would convene another round of the all-Russian Congress of Soviets, and use that as a pretext to seize Petrograd once and for all.
The resulting moves were unmistakeable yet unstoppable. In early November, Military Revolutionary Committees sprung up across Bolshevik-controlled Russia, mobilizing the proletariat to block hostile forces from interfering with the revolution. The Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, in particular, sent out commissars to command the military soviets, formally wresting control away from the PG. Then it was a simple matter of moving the Red Guards, soldiers and sailors into strategic points across Petrograd and ejecting the PG remnants. The October Revolution proceeded so smoothly that many participants, at least in Petrograd, didn’t even know that they were in one!
The Bolsheviks had now successfully seized power, albeit with the willing participation of the soviets. The 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which opened the next day, adopted Lenin’s agenda for change: an immediate armistice with Germany, the immediate nationalization of all land, and eventually, worker control over the factory economy. Of course, Lenin’s writ only went as far as Bolshevik-controlled territory: in time, a few other cities and military formations were added to this, while anti-Bolshevik forces coalesced into the White movement and various peoples sought independence. The Russian Civil War had begun.
VI. Prevention: The Soviet Dictatorship
As the above narrative hopefully showed, the way the Bolshevik movement overpowered the socialist establishment of the PS and the liberal establishment of the PG did not entirely conform to Lenin’s initial strategy for socialist revolution: instead of slowly agitating the proletariat into anti-Czarist revolution, the Bolsheviks stoked chaos to drive the proletariat into an anti-PG revolution. Despite this, the latter still manipulated the public to adopt the movement’s agenda, and so was entirely consistent with Lenin’s strategic thinking.
With the victory of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were now in power. Now, it was Lenin’s turn to worry about whether some future movement could use his own strategy against the Bolshevik state. Indeed, opposition to Lenin’s rule began almost immediately: apart from the military opposition of the Whites, the bourgeoisie in Petrograd also began striking against the new government, and in this they were also joined by the Mensheviks and anti-Bolshevik SRs.
Lenin’s response to these challenges sheds some light on how his own strategy could be countered. Firstly and unsurprisingly, there was the use of state power: institutional violence in the form of press censorship and party bans; and physical violence in the form of the notorious Cheka and the ‘Red Terror’. Any movement can be suppressed with enough state power, but such action comes at a cost to state resources, attractiveness and potential, as the trajectory of the Soviet Union demonstrated.
Secondly and more innovatively, Lenin also sought to neutralize any challenge to the Bolsheviks by monopolizing all forms of political and later, societal organization. As seen in the previous part, this solution had been conceived long before 1917, as Lenin learnt from the failure of the German socialists to preserve their leadership in the face of a heretical proletarian majority. By controlling every organization that could serve as a proletarian voice, the Bolsheviks not only deprived challengers of an entire social movement dimension, but could also use said organizations to further their manipulation of the proletariat and solidify establishment rule.
Starting in 1918, Lenin and especially Trotsky applied this solution in practice, and in doing so demolished the last of the ‘Triple Powers’ that could resist the Bolsheviks, which were the independent soviets themselves. Under the Constitution of the new Russian Soviet Republic, the soviets would still be elected, but the central government had political and financial control over them and so could essentially veto anything they did.
Further controls were imposed during the Russian Civil War, as Trotsky’s policy of ‘Militarization of Labor’ saw the re-establishment of factory hierarchies, which in turn were subordinated to the Party. Managers were re-installed into leadership positions, factory committees now surveilled rather than represented workers, and unions devolved into avenues of Party propaganda. No alternatives were allowed: Trotsky justified this by stating that the proletarian state alone was all that was needed to advance proletarian interests.
At points, even Lenin thought that Trotsky had gone too far in suppressing opposition. But the latter’s severity might have made the difference in early 1921, when the end of the Russian Civil War triggered a new wave of unrest in Petrograd. Calling not for liberalization, but a mere relaxation of Trotsky’s policies and an end to the centralized control of soviets, the nascent movement involved similar groups as 1917: hungry workers, idealistic socialists, and the radical sailors of Kronstadt.
The ultimate result, however, was very far from 1917. On the one hand, the movement idealistically refused to agitate the masses; on the other, the Bolsheviks maintained control of key organizations, most of all the Petrograd Soviet. With them, they managed to manipulate the masses into accepting minor concessions, paint the holdouts as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, and keep most of the military on their side. This all culminated in a successful military assault against Kronstadt itself, which finally ended a period of political turmoil that had begun with the February Revolution of 1917.
VII. Conclusion
Unsurprisingly, given his role in conceptualizing the entire thing, Lenin during the October Revolution proved to be a master at the social movement grand strategy of ‘Mass Agitation’, whose key defining feature is the manipulation of the public, in order to have them identify with and work towards the goals of the social movement. On the one hand, Lenin’s faith in his own ideology and strategy allowed him to hold the line when everybody else wavered; on the other hand, he was also flexible enough to update his tactical and operational strategy in light of actual circumstances, most notably when deploying a strategy of chaos against the PG. The result was a seminal victory that would theoretically inspire socialists across the world.
I say ‘theoretically’, because despite Lenin’s success, few subsequent socialist revolutions actually followed the template set in 1917. Part of this was because establishments became more sensitive and even murderous when it came to socialist agitation; part of this was because the later Soviet Union preferred controllable over effective movements. But part of it might also be because the Communists played down the role of manipulation in Lenin’s strategy: after all, the rationale behind it hardly flattered either Marxism, the proletariat, or the Party!
But without the narrative of manipulation, Communist activists were left with only dramatic scenes like the ‘Storming of the Winter Palace’, giving the impression that only establishment failure and stirring rhetoric were needed for the masses to rise up and impose Communism. This has rarely been true, even during times of political crisis, because alternative societal institutions can and will divert the proletariat away from quote-unquote ‘pure’ socialism. Success requires their neutralization, but the work is long and cynical and probably not what an activist signs up for.
Lenin’s strategy was originally conceived in reaction to the heretical turn of German socialism in the 1900s; now, 2 years after 1917, German socialism would fail Lenin again, this time by going in the opposite direction. In the chaotic aftermath of the Kaiser’s fall, radical German socialists, most notably the Spartacists, tried to seize Berlin, overthrow the moderate socialist government, and install a soviet-like Republic. Their lust for action meant that they, unlike Lenin, barely manipulated the proletariat: as a result, the masses rallied behind the moderate socialists, who in turn allied with the military and successfully suppressed the uprising. Germany therefore did not join the socialist world, dashing Lenin’s hopes of using German capital to construct the Soviet state and put Communism on a firmer footing. So in a sense, Lenin’s strategy, both in its presence and absence, would determine both the rise and eventual fall of Soviet Communism.
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