Russian Revolution

The Bolsheviks and Lenin



On 3 April, arrived in Petrograd, of emigration, Lenin. It is only from this moment that the Bolshevik Party begins to speak at full voice and, what is more important, to its own voice.

The first months of the revolution had been, for bolshevism, a time of disarray and procrastination. In the "Manifesto" of the central committee of the Bolsheviks, prepared immediately after the victory of the insurgency, it was said that "the workers of the factories and plants, as well as the troops raised, must immediately elect their representatives to the provisional revolutionary government".   The manifesto was printed in the official organ of the Soviet without comment nor objections, as if it was only an academic question. But even the Bolsheviks leaders gave their password to order a meaning purely demonstrative. They acted not as representatives of a proletarian party which is preparing to open its own leader the struggle for power, but as the left wing of the democracy which, in proclaiming its principles, se has, for an indefinite period, to play the role of a loyal opposition.

Sukhanov asserted that, at the meeting of the Executive Committee of 1 March the center of the discussion porta only on the conditions for the transmission of power: against the very fact of the formation of a bourgeois government, not a single voice does Eleva, although there was then in the Executive Committee, on thirty-nine members, eleven Bolsheviks and sympathizers including three members of the center, Zaloutsky, Chliapnikov and petrol bombs, were present at the meeting.

The next day, the Soviet, after the own story of Chliapnikov, on some four hundred members, voted against the transmission of power to the bourgeoisie just ten-nine delegates, while the fraction bolshevism had already forty delegates. This vote even went completely unnoticed, in a procedure parliamentary formally, without clear counter-proposals of the side of the Bolsheviks, without...