At the beginning Lenin was absolutely alone in Ms stand. His intransigent demand for immediate cessation of the war against Germany, his call “to turn the imperialist war into a civil war,” outraged all political parties. It played into the hands of his enemies who desperately sought to pin on him the false label of “German agent.”[1] Nonetheless, before the month was out, Lenin had converted the executive committee and the most active spirits of his party. Before his arrival the local Bolsheviks were seriously considering organic fusion with the Mensheviks. Lenin changed all that. He drew a sharp line of division between his own party and all the other working-class parties that refused to accept his programme.
The significance of Lenin’s work in arming his party with a new set of objectives may be gauged by the fact that this involved abandoning doctrines the Bolsheviks had firmly held for an entire decade. Until the February Revolution, all Bolsheviks, including Lenin, believed in what they called “the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants.” The task of this regime would be to carry out in Russia the achievements of the democratic revolutions of the West. In 1917 Lenin changed his position and that of his party. The Russian Revolution was to be the first breach in the world economy of capitalism. It was to be a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would stimulate similar dictatorships in the West which co-operatively would initiate the transition to world socialism.
His opponents predicted that Lenin’s programme would not appease the hunger of the Russian masses for peace, land, and bread; that world-wide socialist revolutions would not follow upon the dictatorship of the proletariat in Europe; that Russia would be devastated by civil war and chaos; that the autocracy of the Czarist bureaucrats and landlords would be replaced by an even more ruthless autocracy of Bolshevik bureaucrats. Despite all criticism from without as well as within his own party, Lenin won his way without yielding an inch.
(b) Once Lenin had converted his party to the programme of civil war and armed insurrection against the democratic Provisional Government, the main task was dear. It was to
- ↑ After all, so the main charge ran, Ludendorff had given him passage through Germany from Switzerland to Russia in the famous sealed train! Where the will to believe is present, and it always is in politics, a great deal can be made of Lenin’s act, although it was undertaken before the eyes of the whole world. It would probably have been sufficient evidence to convict Lenin of treason in the Moscow Trials of 1956–7 had he been alive then.
