slow. The very farthest thing from their minds was the desire to go over to an open offensive when they received word from Lenin that it was now or never.
At first Lenin was in the minority. He raged and stormed. He threatened to go over their heads to the lower party functionaries and to organize matters without them. He wrote letters to influential party members to get them to bring pressure on the lagging executive committee. After fierce and stubborn debate, he won them to his position. How urgent Lenin considered the period they were in—as the period in which to stake ail on a bid for power—is apparent from his letter of October 21, 1917, to the Central Executive Committee, demanding the organization of an armed insurrection during the next few days: “The success of both the Russian and world revolution depends upon two or three days of struggle.”[1] When he finally won his majority by a vote often to two, the die was cast. The Bolsheviks took state power.
(d) That they kept state power during the subsequent year was again due primarily to Lenin’s guiding policy. One group of the Central Committee desired to continue the war against Hohenzollern Germany while appealing to the German workers to emulate the Bolsheviks. Another group advocated the policy of “neither peace nor war.” Lenin stood firm for a signed treaty of peace which would give the Bolsheviks respite from their foreign enemy for the moment and sufficient time to consolidate themselves against their internal foes. During these days, Lenin was again a hopeless minority at first but hammered away until his colleagues yielded. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed.
If Lenin, had not returned to Russia or had died en route, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the hypothesis that Kamenev, Muranov, and Stalin, then in control of Bolshevik policy, would have reversed helm and taken up war to the end against the democratic provisional Government. If during June and July Lenin had not been present to prevail upon the excited spirits among the Bolsheviks and other Enragés and forestall, an uprising, the whole organization would have been destroyed in blood. If, on the eve of October, the Bolsheviks had marked time despite Lenin’s exhortations, Kerensky would have been able to garrison the capital with reliable troops and easily cope with the Bolsheviks. If Lenin had not stopped the Germans by giving them all they wanted, their army would have taken both
- ↑ Collected Works, English translation, vol. 21, p. 99, New York, 1932.
