Among its ten points was the wholesale rejection of ‘limited support’ for the Provisional Government and the ‘no opposition’ pledge of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee. Lenin repudiated without ‘the slightest concession … “revolutionary defencism”’ – continuing to advocate fraternisation at the front. He demanded the confiscation of landlord estates and the nationalisation of land, to be disposed of by peasant soviets; a single national bank under the Soviet’s control; and the abolition of the police, army and bureaucracy. For now, he said, the order of the day was to explain the imperative of a struggle to take power from the government, and to replace any parliamentary republic with a ‘Republic of Soviets’.
His speech unleashed bedlam. The impact of the Theses was electric, and Lenin’s isolation almost total. Speaker after outraged speaker denounced him. Tsereteli, the prominent Menshevik Lenin anathematised, accused him of breaking with Marx and Engels. Goldenberg, a Menshevik who had once been a leading Bolshevik, said Lenin was now an anarchist, ‘on Bakunin’s throne’. Lenin’s words, yelled the furious Menshevik Bogdanov, were ‘the ravings of a madman’.
Chernov, the SR leader, who reached Petrograd from exile five days after Lenin, after a dangerous sea journey through submarine-infested waters, saw Lenin’s ‘political excesses’ as so complete that he had marginalised himself. The evening of the prodigal’s shocking speech, another Menshevik, Skobelev, assured Milyukov that Lenin’s ‘lunatic ideas’ disqualified him from being a danger, and told Prince Lvov that the Bolshevik leader was ‘a has-been’.
And what of the Bolsheviks? How appalled were they?
It is often claimed that on 18 April the party’s Petersburg Committee rejected the Theses by thirteen to two, with one abstention. The story, however, is based on inaccurate minutes. Two of those present, Bagdatev and Zalezhsky, later insisted that the committee voted to approve the Theses, but by thirteen to two rejected Zalezhsky’s rather fawning motion that these be accepted without criticism or reservation. The Committee instead reserved the right to dissent on specifics and details.
And dissent they did. After Lenin’s speech at the Kshesinskaya Mansion, his comrades were not backward in coming forward with concerns.
The wrangles were mostly over tactical issues, such as Lenin’s suggestion that they change the name of the party, or his new political emphasis on the soviets rather than the more traditional propagandist stress on convening the Constituent Assembly. A particular point at issue was that Lenin adamantly opposed, almost as distasteful, making ‘impermissible, illusion-breeding “demands”’ on the Provisional Government, which would and could never accede to them. Instead he advocated ‘patient explanation’ in the soviets that the government could not be trusted. By contrast, Bagdatev, Kamenev and various others saw such ‘demands’ as a proven method of puncturing illusions, precisely because the government would fail to meet them. Kamenev called this ‘a method of exposure’.
A continuity, then, between ‘Old Bolshevism’ and Lenin’s theses could certainly be argued, as it was by many activists, such as Ludmila Stahl. But a permeable membrane exists between tactics and analysis – and emphasis. There was kinship, certainly, but the stress in the uncompromising theses was more than ‘mere’ rhetoric. It was no surprise that some in the party, both on Lenin’s side and against, considered them a break with Bolshevik tradition. Such debates could simultaneously be misunderstandings of the depth of shared ground, and symptomatic of real divergence more substantial than that supposedly in the ‘Letters from Afar’.
Bolshevik concerns at Lenin’s tack were widespread. The Kiev and Saratov organisations rejected the Theses outright. Lenin had been out of Russia too long, their members said, to understand its situation. Zinoviev, his comrade-in-exile and close collaborator, called the Theses ‘perplexing’; others in the party were not so kind.
At first the board of Pravda were hesitant to reproduce the Theses, but Lenin insisted, and they were published on 7 April – swiftly followed by Kamenev’s ‘Our Disagreements’, distancing the Bolsheviks from Lenin’s ‘personal opinions’. ‘Lenin’s general scheme appears to us unacceptable,’ he wrote, ‘inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois–democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution.’
The party, more than many on the left, had always focused on the agency of the working class in collaboration with the peasantry. The post-1905 ‘Old Bolshevik’ hope for the revolution in Russia was steadily, if rather nebulously, pinned on that ‘democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry’ destined to sweep away the muck of feudalism and oversee what could only be a move to a bourgeois–democratic system, including on the land. As late as 1914, Lenin was still writing that a Russian revolution would be limited to ‘a democratic republic … confiscation of the landed estates, and an eight-hour working day’. Now, though, he was dismissing Kamenev’s formula as ‘obsolete’, ‘no good at all’, ‘dead’. In the April Theses Lenin wrote that Russia was, right now, ‘passing from the first stage of the revolution … to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants’.
This was a shift. As regards the ‘second stage’, Lenin was clear that it was not ‘our immediate task to “introduce” socialism’, prior to a European socialist revolution, but to place power in the hands of working people, rather than to pursue political class collaboration as advocated by the Mensheviks. ‘Let the bourgeoisie continue to trade and build its mills and factories,’ the Bolshevik activist Sapranov later glossed it to young Eduard Dune, ‘but power must rest with the workers, not with the factory owners, traders, and their servants.’ Still, there is not necessarily a neat firewall between ‘trading and building’ on the one hand and ‘power’ on the other, and there was in Lenin’s position at least a tendential implication going further, an eye on a horizon. There is a political logic, after all, implicit in taking power. There was something pregnant even in Lenin’s emphasis – it was not an immediate task to introduce socialism – but …
No wonder Lenin was accused by his own party of falling into Trotsky’s heresy of ‘permanent revolution’, of folding February into, or at least edging determinedly towards, a full socialist insurrection.
But more Bolshevik exiles were returning. And they tended to be more radical than those who had remained. The economic hardships in the country were worsening, the inadequacies of the Provisional Government growing clear, the brief honeymoon of cross-class collaboration souring, and the Bolsheviks were recruiting from a mostly young, disillusioned, angry, even impetuous milieu. It was in this context that Lenin began a campaign to win over his comrades.