[February, 1999]
On 3 April, 1917 Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, Petrograd, in the celebrated ‘sealed train’ of legend. After greeting the enthusiastic crowd of soldiers and Bolsheviks there to welcome him, he was taken to the Bolshevik Party headquarters. To describe the events of that evening—in particular the speech that Lenin was to give and its effect not only on his audience but on the whole course of the revolution thereafter—as ‘dramatic’, would be to rather understate the case. In the description of one Bolshevik eye witness:
[Lenin] resolutely assailed the tactics to which the leading party groups and individual comrades had been pursuing before his return. He [...] gave out the slogan, ‘No support whatever to the government of capitalists’, at the same time calling on the Party to fight for power to be taken over by the Soviets, for a socialist revolution. Using a few striking examples, Comrade Lenin brilliantly demonstrated the whole falsity of the policy of the Provisional Government, the glaring contradiction between its promises and its actions, between words and deeds, emphasising that it was our duty to expose ruthlessly is counter-revolutionary and anti-democratic pretensions and conduct. [...] The ultimate triumph of Soviet power, which many saw in the hazy future, was brought down by Comrade Lenin to the plane of an urgently-necessary conquest of the revolution, to be attained within a very short time. This speech of his was in the fullest sense historic. [1]
To say the least, this is not what had been expected. From the beginning of March, with the arrival from exile of Kamenev and Stalin, the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd had somewhat softened is line towards the Provisional Government, in response to which there had emerged a left current within the party (the most prominent figure in which was Molotov). What had been anticipated was that Lenin would come down on the side of the majority and call the lefts to account. But no. ‘No one expected this,’ recalled one observer, ‘On the contrary, they expected Vladimir Ilyich to arrive and call to order the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee and especially Comrade Molotov, who occupied a particularly irreconcilable position with respect to the Provisional Government.’ [2] In fact, Lenin had done the opposite, confounding everyone. The non-party Menshevik sympathiser Sukhanov vividly caught the impact of Lenin’s speech.
I shall never forget that thunder-like speech, which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidentally dropped in, but all the true believers. I am certain that no one had expected anything of the sort. It seemed as though all the elements had risen from their abodes, and the sprit of universal destruction, knowing neither barriers nor doubts, neither human difficulties nor human calculations, was hovering around [...] above the heads of the bewitched disciples. [3]
The next day Lenin presented his ten theses on The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution—better known today as the April Theses [4]—to the rest of the party leadership. The fundamental point was made in the second thesis:
The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. [5]
From this Lenin argued that there should be ‘no support for the Provisional Government’, only ‘exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding demand that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government.’ ‘The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government [...].’ Therefore, the call was for ‘not a parliamentary republic—to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step—but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.’ [6] Among the economic demands contained in the theses were the call for the nationalisation of all land, the transformation of model farms under Soviet control, and the merger of all existing banks into a single bank. Thesis eight read: ‘Not the “introduction” of socialism as an immediate task, but the immediate placing of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in control of social production and distribution of goods.’ [7]
Although the theses were subsequently to be published—in a somewhat bowdlerised form—in the party organ Pravda, this by no means indicated that Lenin had been able to convince the Petrograd leadership; far from it, for the next day’s edition carried an editorial note signed by Kamenev which, noting that the theses represented only Lenin’s ‘personal opinion’, concluded that ‘Lenin’s general scheme [...] appears to us unacceptable.’ [8] Lenin was to encounter further obstacles: his positions were to be rejected by the Bolshevik Committees in Petrograd, Moscow and Kiev in fairly short order. Sukhanov’s assessment that Lenin found himself in ‘complete intellectual isolation, not only among Social-Democrats in general, but also among his own disciples’ [9] is difficult to disagree with.
The turning point in Lenin’s fortunes came with the Petrograd City Conference of Bolshevik Organisations of 14 April, where Lenin won a number of decisive votes against the opposition—led by Kamenev—to his positions. This success was repeated at the All-Russian Bolshevik Party Conference of 24-29 April (meeting under the shadow of the resignation of the Cadet minister Miliukov over the scandal of the secret letter to the allies reassuring them that the revolution would not take Russia out of the war). Lenin’s success at these two conferences cannot be put down fundamentally to his own authority in the party—considerable though this was—or even (as in the hagiographies) to his own political acumen or tactical brilliance: what was fundamental in this respect was the influx of new party members at this point, the bulk of them radicalised industrial workers. [10] There was a dramatic confluence between Lenin’s conclusions and their own, and it was this that gave Lenin the necessary weight within the party to carry the day. Opposition remained, however, and that even those in the leadership who at last came in behind Lenin still to some degree remained to be convinced to some degree was indicated by their hesitation on the eve of the October insurrection itself. [11]
The difficulties faced by Lenin in getting his positions accepted by the Bolshevik Party should not, perhaps, surprise us. For had it not been axiomatic for Bolshevism that the coming revolution in Russia was to be a bourgeois revolution—albeit a bourgeois revolution actually led by the workers allied with the peasantry? And here was Lenin advancing the absurd notion of a direct movement towards the socialist revolution! It is at this point that we encounter an important historiographical paradox. For the official Stalinist [12] account of the course of the revolutionary events of 1917 there was in fact no significant change in Bolshevik policy at all: all that Lenin succeeded in doing in April was—naturally, through recourse to his infallible wisdom and tactical genius—to bring the Party back in line with its pre-1917 understanding. In accounts of this stamp it is suggested that Lenin did not significantly alter pre-1917 Bolshevik conceptions at all, since they were both adequate to and harmonious with events as they actually played out. There were two revolutions, each with a different class character and social content. February was the bourgeois-democratic revolution; October the socialist. And if the supervening ‘stage’ was shorter-lived than previously imagined, didn’t Lenin himself note in 1905 that ‘from the democratic revolution we shall at once [...] begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half way.’? [13]
For this school of historiography there was in fact simply no contradiction at all between the preconceptions of pre-April 1917 Bolshevism, and both Lenin’s own positions of April and after and the actual course of events. Thus, for the authors of the 1943 edition of the famous ‘Short Course’ history, for example, Lenin’s April Theses ‘provided the Party and the proletariat with a clear revolutionary line for the transition from the bourgeois to the Socialist revolution’. [14] The acceptance of the fact of two revolutions, distinct in social content and class character, is maintained. In another, more recent, account we find an almost identical exposition. What had happened in 1917 was that Lenin had ‘accurately analysed the situation in the country and on that basis [had drawn] [...] the conclusion that the bourgeois-democratic revolution had ended, for power had passed to a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie.[...] He called for a transition to the revolution’s second stage [...].’ [15] Lenin’s reorientation of the Bolshevik Party in April 1917, we are led to believe, rather than representing a break with the conception of separate stages, was in fact founded upon the fact that what he had previously identified as the essential precondition for the socialist revolution—a discrete bourgeois-democratic revolution—had already been consummated.
This view, that February was a bourgeois-democratic revolution of the type envisaged by pre-1917 Bolshevism, and that all that Lenin’s intervention in April represented was a tactical adjustment rather than a fundamental change of line, is, I would suggest to the contrary, nothing more than a Stalinist fantasy; the rest of what follows is an attempt to support this claim.
To begin: in the first place, why was it axiomatic that for pre-1917 Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike that the coming revolution was necessarily bourgeois and not socialist in character? In its Marxist sense—and it must not be forgotten that the leadership of the Mensheviks, as much as the Bolsheviks, were not only well-versed in Marxist theory but regarded it as a fundamental tool in their political armoury—socialism, properly understood, required not just the abolition of private property, but a level of productivity sufficient to release the downtrodden from their subjection to the cruel burdens of exhausting toil and the division of labour: for both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the idea that undeveloped Russia with its enormous and backward peasantry was in any sense ‘ripe’ for socialism was an idea that would only have been regarded as ridiculous. In order for the conditions for the very possibility of a socialist revolution to appear, it was first necessary for Russia to undergo an extended period of capitalist development; a course clearly predicated on a successful bourgeois revolution. Then—and only then—would the notion of a socialist revolution have any relevance or meaning in Russia. Indeed, this understanding was at the heart of the rupture between Russian Marxism and populism as the former emerged out of and in antagonism with the latter. Moreover, there was good textual evidence in Marx himself to support this contention, as, for example, when he pointed out in the preface to Capital that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’ [16]
However, it was on this point—on the necessity of a bourgeois revolution of some character—that the concord between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ended. The latter, not unreasonably perhaps, believed that the bourgeois revolution in Russia would actually be led by the Russian bourgeoisie itself: that the revolution would place them in political and social power, and that the role of the working class in this process was only to play a supporting role. Against this Menshevik conception—of an alliance between the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary force—for the Bolsheviks (and, naturally, central in the formulation of this view, was Lenin), however, the liberal bourgeoisie was quite literally incapable of leading the decisive struggle against Tsarist autocracy—a fact to which the experience of 1905 had so eloquently testified. So, although the revolution was to be bourgeois in its tasks—in its social content—it was not to be bourgeois in its leadership. Rather, that latter task was to fall not upon the bourgeoisie allied to the proletariat but to the proletariat allied to the peasantry: together the two classes would establish a ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.’ [17] Notwithstanding its leadership, however, that the tasks of the revolution were to be confined to the arena of the bourgeois-democratic terrain, was, for Lenin, beyond doubt, as this representative formulation of 1905 makes plain:
Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European, and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class. [...] Marxism has irrevocably broken with the Narodnik and anarchist rubbish that Russia, for instance, can bypass capitalist development, escape from capitalism, or skip it in some way other than that of the class struggle, on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism. [18]
Lenin’s decisive innovation was, of course, that, to carry this out, it was necessary for the proletariat and peasantry, under the leadership of revolutionary social democracy, to actually take power. But he consistently held to the view—at least up until 1917—that a revolution of this bourgeois-democratic character was the precondition to any prospect of a future socialist revolution; and he frequently berated those who he thought confused either the two different types of revolution, or the two different sets of tasks historically assigned to each.
How can we judge whether or not the Stalinist conception of the February revolution is exactly the bourgeois-democratic revolution as envisaged by pre-1917 Bolshevism? In the first place, however inconsistent Lenin may have been as to how long the supervening period between the bourgeois and the proletarian revolutions was to be, he was positively and consistently unambiguous on the fact that during this period there had of necessity to be a stage of capitalist development on European or American lines before any possibility of considering the socialist revolution arose. That this bourgeois-democratic stage had to be completed was axiomatic to pre-1917 Bolshevism: it was a precondition for the proletarian revolution. Clearly, to argue that this had any meaningful sense been accomplished from February to April 1917 in Russia is manifestly ridiculous.
Now, the April Theses acknowledged that power, in the form of the Provisional Government, had passed into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Is this sufficient grounds for characterising the revolution of February as bourgeois democratic? Again, I would suggest not, because to argue this is to completely misunderstand the nature of the pre-1917 Bolshevik schema, which had at its heart the belief that the bourgeoisie—in power or otherwise—was incapable of consummating the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The revolution was to be bourgeois in its agenda, not in its personnel. And in fact, this aspect of the old Bolshevik schema was, in a negative sense, proved correct.
In truth, the combination of the two revolutions [bourgeois and proletarian] had already appeared in February, but in shadowy form. The Tsar and his last government were brought down by a general strike and a mass insurrection of workers and soldiers who at once created their Councils or Soviets, the potential organs of a new state. Prince Lvov, Miliukov and Kerensky took power from the hands of a confused and groping Petrograd Soviet, which willingly yielded it to them; and they exercised it only as long as the Soviets tolerated them. But their governments carried out no major act of bourgeois revolution. Above all, they did not break up the aristocracy’s landed estates and give land to the peasants. Even as a bourgeois revolution, the February revolution was manqué. [19]
The tasks that made up the bourgeois-democratic revolution—a thorough-going agrarian revolution, the comprehensive destruction of the entire absolutist state machine—were precisely not accomplished by the February revolution at all—but by that of October. Indeed, it was the failure of the provisional government to win the bourgeois-democratic ground that not only lay behind Lenin’s call for its downfall but that in the end made the October revolution itself necessary. Rather than the bourgeois-democratic revolution being a precondition for the proletarian revolution, it transpired that the proletarian revolution was the precondition for the bourgeois-democratic agenda. [20]
The argument that the February revolution represented the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the sense envisaged by pre-1917 Bolshevism seems to me untenable. At the very least, the evidence seems clear that at the time, in April 1917, the participants themselves grasped that most clearly. That was exactly the reason why Lenin’s pronouncements were greeted with such horror by Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike: precisely because he was, consciously and transparently to all, jettisoning the whole pre-1917 schema. But if we accept this to be the case, the question poses itself as to what it was that prompted Lenin’s change of course in April 1917? What lay behind this fundamental adjustment?
What we can discern here is that far from representing some minor tactical reorientation, as the Stalinist interpretation would have it, or even being based on a conjunctural assessment of the domestic constellation of class forces alone, [21] what lay behind the shift in Lenin’s thought was a fundamental change in his approach to capitalism on an international scale—the culmination of a train of thought that was sparked by the outbreak of the First World War. What had shocked Lenin in 1914 was not so much the outbreak of war itself: social democrats had been expecting war, and the Second International had frequently discussed what its tactics to prevent war should be if it did in fact break out. What really prompted Lenin to engage in a fundamental process of rethinking was the way that the International itself had capitulated so totally and absolutely at the beginning of the hostilities: this was the real shock for the anti-war social democrats. [22] Lenin was thus faced with the need to engage in a thoroughgoing and radical reappraisal of the Marxism of the Second International, in the context of the search for an explanation of both the causes of the war and the International’s collapse; and the fruits of this endeavour were to result in—amongst other texts—his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. [23]
The implications of Lenin’s work pointed to the conclusion that in those countries with a belated capitalist evolution the organic process of the capitalist development on a western European pattern—that is, effectively, with regard to those countries that had undergone a successful bourgeois revolution—’organic’ capitalist development was not now going to happen: new, prospering nation states were not now going to come into existence. Thus, in 1915:
The whole epoch from the Great French Revolution to the Franco-Prussian war is one of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of its triumph, of the bourgeoisie on the upgrade, an epoch of bourgeois-democratic movements in general and of bourgeois-national movements in particular, an epoch of the rapid breakdown of the obsolete feudal-absolutist institutions. The second epoch is that of the full domination and decline of the bourgeoisie, one of transition from its progressive character towards reactionary and even ultra-reactionary finance capital. [...] The third epoch, which has just set in, places the bourgeoisie in the same ‘position’ as that in which the feudal lords found themselves in the first epoch. [24]
Capitalism, in short, had ceased being progressive, and the tasks that had normally been assigned to the bourgeois democratic revolution—national independence, political democracy, agrarian reform—were now logically objectively anti-imperialist, and therefore anti-capitalist, in form: the property not of the bourgeois but of the socialist revolution: a socialist revolution that would, of necessity, be international in scope. [25] This conception of imperialism as the epoch of ‘decadent’ capitalism is central to the whole discussion of the character of the revolution that Lenin introduced to Bolshevism: for Lenin the whole context had altered. As Neil Harding points out, now ‘the “society” which was the subject of Lenin’s investigation was no longer Russia [...] it was rather the “society” of international finance capital.’ [26]
Of course, as we know, things turned out differently. The European revolution did not materialise—or, more accurately, in Germany, in Bavaria, and in Hungary, it was crushed. The isolated Soviet republic suffered the deprivations of civil war, imperialist invasion and consequent famine and massive economic dislocation. The subsequent development of the Bolshevik tradition is well known. Yet an important element in the self-legitimatisation of the post-Lenin Soviet regime was the claim to the tradition and heritage of Bolshevism. A second, scarcely less important consideration, at least initially, was a public renunciation of Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers—a matter, as Norman Geras puts it, ‘more than just a matter of historical sentimentality.’ [27] Now, Stalinism as an historical phenomenon is beyond the scope of this survey: yet the principal target my argument is precisely that set of Stalinist-inspired presuppositions that paint a linear continuity between pre and post 1917 Bolshevism. As I suggest, questions of legitimation are at play here, alongside considerations of political expediency, for, along with the introduction of the slogan of ‘socialism in one country’, the slogan of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ was itself re-unearthed in the 1920s and inserted into the programme of the Communist International. [28] Yet how could this have been? Surely the experience of 1917 had finally convinced the party’s leaders of its inapplicability as a realistic route to revolution?
In 1939 the Caribbean-born writer and (and at the time) Trotskyist C. L. R. James visited Leon Trotsky, then in exile in Coyocán, Mexico, for a series of formal discussions—discussions which were transcribed and subsequently published. Predictably, a great number of subjects were addressed. During one of the sessions, which focused on the course of the Communist International over the previous two decades, James asked Trotsky whether he shared the view that the line of the International in the Chinese revolution of 1927—that of an alliance between the Chinese Communist Party and the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang of Chiang Kai Shek, a policy that had disastrous results for the Communists—constituted deliberate ‘sabotage’ of the revolution. [29] The exchange which resulted makes for fascinating reading.
Trotsky—Not at all. Why should they sabotage it? I was on a committee (with Chicherin, Voroshilov, and some others) on the Chinese revolution. They were even opposed to my attitude, which was considered pessimistic. They were anxious for its success.
James—For the success of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Wasn’t their opposition to the proletarian revolution the opposition of a bureaucracy which was quite prepared to support a bourgeois democratic revolution, but from the fact of its being a being a bureaucracy could not support a proletarian revolution?
Trotsky—Formalism. We had the greatest revolutionary party in the world in 1917. In 1936 it strangled the revolution in Spain. How did it develop from 1917 to 1936? That is the question. According to your argument, the degeneration would have started in October 1917. In my view it started in the first years of the New Economic Policy. But even in 1927 the whole party was eagerly awaiting the outcome of the issue of the Chinese revolution. [...] The party was excited over the Chinese revolution. Only during 1923 had it reached a high pitch of intensity. No, you want to start with the degeneration complete. Stalin and Company genuinely believed that the Chinese revolution was a bourgeois democratic revolution and sought to establish the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
James—You mean that Stalin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Rykov and the rest did not understand the course of the Russian Revolution?
Trotsky—They did not. They took part and events overwhelmed them. Their position on China was the same they had in March 1917 until Lenin came. In different writings of theirs you will see passages that show that they never understood. [30]
Of course, in 1939 Trotsky had his own axes to grind with regard
to the Comintern. Yet his assessment is a highly revealing one. Earlier
I referred that the hesitancy within the leadership of the Bolshevik Party
on the eve of October reflected the same unease that had been expressed
in April. Yet if Trotsky’s reflections are accurate, then ‘the greatest
revolutionary party in the world’, in the leadership of one of the most
dramatic and significant political events in world history: on Trotsky’s
account, at best only two of the party’s core leadership really understood
what, exactly, had been done.
Note—For the works of Marx cited below, the references are to Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 47 volumes (London, 1975-), abbreviated hereafter for convenience to MECW; references to citations of Lenin throughout are to the English version of the fourth Russian edition of the Collected Works, 47 volumes (Moscow, 1960-1970), abbreviated to LCW.
[1] F. F. Raskolnikov (Fyodor Fyodorovich Ilyin), Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 (London, 1982) 76-7.
[2] F. Drabina, quoted in Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1960), 43.
[3] N. N. Sukhanov (Nikolai Nikolayevich Himmer), The Russian Revolution 1917 (Princeton, 1984), 280.
[4] Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’, LCW vol. 24, 19-26.
[5] Ibid., 22.
[6] Ibid., 22-3.
[7] Ibid., 23.
[8] Cited in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, 3 vols. (London, 1950-1953), vol. 1 (1950), 81.
[9] Sukhanov, ibid., 288.
[10] See Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin (London, 1975), 134, 158.
[11] As Liebman ably demonstrates: ibid., 134.
[12] I use the word ‘Stalinist’ advisedly: what I have in mind are those accounts of the revolution that were developed, principally for political purposes, over the mid 1920s to the mid 1950s. Following 1956, the process of de-Stalinisation opened up to a certain extent the conditions for more open-minded historical research and elaboration of concepts, although progress was slow, and the ‘classical’ Stalinist accounts persisted. What I am at pains to avoid is a running together of pre-Stalinist Soviet interpretations and post-Lenin Soviet interpretations, for, as I hope will become clear, I regard them as fundamentally opposed.
[13] ‘Social Democracy’s Attitude to the Peasant Movement’, LCW vol. 9, 237.
[14] History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), edited by the Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), (London, 1943), 168.
[15] Pavel Alikinovich Golub, The Bolsheviks and the Armed Forces in Three Revolutions: Problems and Experience of Military Work (Moscow, 1979), 128.
[16] Karl Marx, ‘Preface to the First German Edition’ of Capital, volume 1, MECW vol. 35, 9. For a counterposed perspective by Marx, however, specifically related to Russia, see ‘Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski’, MECW, vol. 24, 196-201; ‘Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich’, MECW, vol. 24, 346-71; and ‘Marx to Vera Zasulich’, MECW, vol. 46, 71.
[17] ‘Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, vol. 9, 77-88.
[18] Ibid., 48-9.
[19] Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-67 (Oxford, 1967), 23.
[20] See Trotsky’s succinct account in ‘The Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39 (New York, 1969), 110-16. The ‘third’ account in Trotsky’s report is, naturally, his own conception of ‘permanent revolution’.
[21] As is suggested by, for example, D. A. Longley, ‘The Divisions in the Bolshevik Party in March 1917’, Soviet Studies 24 (1972), 61-76, especially 67-76.
[22] It is reported, for example, that upon being shown the copy of the German SPD’s paper Vorwärts which reported the decision of the party’s Reichstag delegation to vote for war credits Lenin at first was convinced that it was a forgery, so certain was he that such an action was impossible.
[23] ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline’, LCW vol. 22, 185-304.
[24] ‘Under a False Flag’, LCW vol. 21, 146.
[25] This understanding of the international nature of the revolution is central. Even before April 1917, Lenin’s conception of the Russian revolution as a component of an international revolution, in that a victorious bourgeois revolution in Russia would act as a powerful stimulus to socialist revolutions in western Europe, the latter in turn providing a milieu which would facilitate Russia’s own passage to the socialist revolution, was key. With the perspective of the proletarian revolution in Russia, however, the international dimension grew hugely in dimension. ‘Socialism in One Country’ was yet to come: for the Bolsheviks of 1917 the very possibility of constructing socialism in one country, never mind one as backward as Russia, would have been regarded as nothing other than absurd. See Liebman’s excellent textual treatment of this question in Leninism under Lenin, 359-65.
[26] Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 2 vols. (London and Basinstoke, 1981), vol. 2, 147. Although Harding is absolutely correct here, his overall conception of ’Leninism’ is flawed, inasmuch as he sees Lenin’s response to the outbreak of world war and the collapse of the Second International as the definitive formative experience. Harding identifies two phases in the evolution of Lenin’s thought: the first opening with the publication of The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899, the second proceeding from the writing of Imperialism. (See ibid., 317-19; also his Leninism (London, 1996), 7-10.) This ‘periodisation’ misses the definitive moment in the development of Lenin’s concepts: the emergence of his theory of the party over 1902 to 1903, on which—I would argue—subsequent developments were predicated. Harding approaches the question by assigning the economic as the decisive element in Lenin’s thought. Lenin was not, however, a crude ’economic determinist’; indeed, the significance of his thinking and his central role in the revolution is precisely due to this fact.
[27] Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London, 1976), 96.
[28] At its Sixth Congress in 1928, in fact. See the account in the officially-sanctioned Outline History of the Communist International (Moscow, 1971) 275-80.
[29] For an account of the relationship between the Communist International and the Chinese Communist Party, see Robert C. North, Moscow and the Chinese Communists (Stanford, 1963), 79-121.
[30] ‘Discussions With Trotsky’, in C. L. R. James, At the Rendezvous With Victory: Selected Writings (London, 1984), 61-2.