This blog, updated for the 100th anniversary in 2017, is a summary of the outstanding "History of the Russian Revolution" written by one of its leaders, Leon Trotsky. The Bolsheviks needed to prepare for an overthrow of the Provisional Government in favor of “All Power to the Soviets,” to open the era of international revolution. The Bolsheviks’ plan was to march to the halls where the soviet was meeting, to keep fresh in their mind who they were meant to be representing under the banners of “All Power to the Soviets” and “Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists.” Giving an indication of the growing hegemony of the Bolsheviks within the most militant section of the working class, the Central Council of Factory and Shop Councils decided to organize for the demonstration. Class collaboration under the auspices of building a new revolutionary state was boldly promoted by Russia’s chief “socialist” parties: the Mensheviks, who dominated the urban working class and petty bourgeoisie, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who thought themselves the representatives of Russia’s peasants. The Bolsheviks won over the leadership of their peers most rapidly at the point of direct confrontation—the shop committees in the factories were solidly Bolshevik months before the party dominated the soviet. Originally formed in the mass strike movement of 1905, the soviets (Russian for “council”) began as committees for organizing strike activity, but grew as the conflict developed into organs for self-governance and centers for armed struggle against tsarism. But his is not the Lenin of Stalinist myth. 2017 … Trotsky describes the logic of Tseretelli’s demand: To carry the Compromise policy through to a successful end—that is, to the establishment of a parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie—demanded the disarming of the workers and soldiers. Leon Trotsky The History of the Russian Revolution VOLUME ONE The Overthrow of Tzarism ONLINE VERSION: Translated by Max Eastman, 1932 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 8083994 ISBN 0913460834 Transcribed for the World Wide Web by John Gowland (Australia), Alphanos Pangas (Greece) and David Walters (United States) 1997 through 2000 The active and militant minority inevitable puts forward under fire from the enemy its more revolutionary and self-sacrificing elements. Early in October, Trotsky introduced a resolution into the Bolshevik-controlled Petrograd Soviet that called for the formation of a military committee to prepare the “revolutionary defence of Petrograd”. The soldiers were right. What became the first day of the February Revolution didn’t appear to anyone to be of any historic importance. 11 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), 309–310. Here, we present part one of a two-part series outlining the main features of Trotsky’s work. Leon Trotsky(1879 - 1940) was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist who became one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to … The common language of Russia’s left was colored by Marxism, “not so much a criticism of capitalist society as an argument for the inevitability of the bourgeois development of the country.” Therefore, the majority “Marxists” (“Compromisers” in Trotsky’s lexicon) saw their role as facilitating the establishment of bourgeois democracy, from which, at some much later date, a real movement for socialism could emerge. They thought any attempt to pursue an independent working-class path, or to dare to speak of socialism in the near term would doom the revolution. Much of the content was written in the 1990's before being produced as a Lewisham Socialist Party pamphlet in 2007. But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers…the Cossacks, without openly breaking discipline, failed to force the crowd to disperse, but flowed through it in streams…. This slogan successfully dragged even some of the most dyed-in-the-wool revolutionaries behind it, including some leading Bolsheviks. Lenin did tip the balance, and was uniquely positioned to do so given the years of common work he shared with the cadre of the party; but had the party not been in such a state of balance, his efforts would not have yielded such dramatic results. The new ministry included the nephew of the tsar, Prince Lvov, as prime minister, (who Trotsky characterizes as having “a strong dislike for excitement”) and some of Russia’s richest industrialists and landlords. For his role in the latter, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. The soviet immediately set about to address the most pressing issues of the country’s population: food and money. Stalin forcefully articulated the preexisting party line that the revolution must be bourgeois. Trotsky describes its paralysis: “Up to the days of October in the hard moments it was always undergoing a crisis, and in the intervals between crises it was merely existing.” The Liberals drew the Compromisers into a new Cabinet; at first hesitant, the Compromisers were forced by the mood of their base. May not the cure prove more ruinous than the disease?”, Both the court and the bourgeoisie were held aloft by collaboration with Western capital. The Soviet Executive Committee, which wholly supported the offensive, feared this position would cement their isolation from the masses. EBook proofed and reset by Pablo Stern (Britain), 2017, with a new cover inspired by David King's 60th anniversary cover. 2013, from the on-line version of The History of the Russian Revolution available at the Trotsky Internet Archive. In 1915 this reversed course: economic strikes resumed, and escalated so rapidly their numbers doubled by 1916. Menshevik Minister of the Interior Irakli Tseretelli demanded the disarming of the Bolsheviks, which was a thorny problem because they had no stores of arms, but the loyalty of sections of the army and armed workers. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he plotted a coup of the provisional government with Lenin and formed the Red Army, which defeated the anti-Bolshevik White Army in … Had tea on the balcony. In 1917, one of the greatest events in human history took place when, led by the Bolshevik Party, the workers and peasants of Russia carried through a victorious revolution. I hope it not only provides a useful summary of the. But not for long. The cogency of Lenin’s political insights didn’t spring from an otherworldly vision, but from his ability to listen with great sensitivity and look at reality without sentimentality to perceive what was really there. He make big impact in Russian history. Under these events, so striking in their rhythm, molecular processes were taking place, welding together the heterogeneous parts of the working class into one political whole.”. They could not now move forward at all without bumping into this wall erected by themselves, and knocking it over.”. The wavering of the party center in the first days after the revolution was steadied by the return of firm hands to the helm of Pravda. Few political characters have gotten their comeuppance so fully and so quickly. The book was initially published in Germany in 1930. They remained two factions of the same party, more or less united at different periods, until they formally split into two separate parties in 1912. The so-called leader and master of the Russian Empire had an outlook that “was not broader than that of a minor police official—with this difference, that the latter would have a better knowledge of reality and be less burdened with superstitions.” Most damning are the tsar’s diaries, which chronicle the most tedious banalities of his daily life while Russia convulses. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: 1929–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 219. He achieves in his image of the revolution the unity of the subjective and objective elements.1. The soldiers felt themselves again deceived. But Tseretelli was not only right. Went paddling in a canoe.”, In February of 1917, in response to a telegram from the president of the Duma on the collapse of the military, he wrote “Again that fat-bellied Rodzianko has written me a lot of nonsense, which I won’t even bother to answer.”, Trotsky argues that the apparently personal traits of the tsar—his detachment and blandness—were the personification of the obsolescence of the monarchy. Trotsky’s personal involvement in no way inhibits his scientific view. THE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Leon Trotsky - This is the outstanding Marxist work on the Russian revolution. While in the metal industry, especially in Petrograd, a layer of hereditary proletarians was crystallised out, having made a complete break with the country, in the Urals the prevailing type was half-proletarian, half-peasant. The law of combined development of backwards countries—in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backwards elements with the more modern factors—here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution.… In order to realize the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historical species: a peasant war—that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development—and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalizing its decline. This is not to say that Trotsky deemphasizes the role of the Bolsheviks or their outstanding leaders. Although not yet overstepping the bounds of bourgeois democracy, the Bolsheviks acted, or strove to act—however confused by their leadership—like uncompromising revolutionists. Local sections passed resolutions criticizing the vacillation within their own party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Trotskyism. They had every intention of continuing the war and annexing anything they could get their hands on—but they needed to reinvent the rationale for the slaughter. The soviet represented the sheer force of the mobilized working class and soldiers in their creativity and scope. He argued the situation of dual power was not an “advantageous” arrangement as Stalin had put it in Pravda, it was an unstable balance that could only end in the smashing of the soviets or the Provisional Government. The world’s largest and most advanced factories existed within a sea of peasants laboring on the land with techniques unchanged for centuries. And this highest determination never can, or will, remain unarmed. The June demonstration was a test of the contending forces in Russia, but a peaceful one. 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