In the April Theses, Lenin talked about the political strategy of the revolution. It emphasized that the revolution was not an isolated national event, but an international one and that the Russian revolution was the first international revolution. He applied Marxism practically and this sparked the “revolutionary nationalism of the poor” to overthrow the Tsar. The April These was first read at the train Station in Petrograd on the 4th April 1917 to a crowd of enthusiastic workers, peasants and soldiers by Lenin himself.
Though before the Revolution, the Bolsheviks got elected to the Duma when it was opportune, Lenin suggested capitalism could only be removed through the revolution and not gradual reforms from within (Fabianism) and from without (social democracy) which would fail. This being that, the ruling capitalist class, because of its dominance on the means of production decides on the nature of the political power in a capitalist society. The slogan, “For a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry” illustrates that, a revolution in the backward Russia required an alliance between the workers and the peasants as the proletariats were not many and their numbers could not allow them to take over power by themselves. Trotsky said that the peasants yearned for the middle class position and therefore it was the proletariats who naturally should be at the forefront of the revolution to ensure that it is socialist and democratic. It was Trotsky’s approach that influenced Lenin in his approach to the October Revolution. Initially he disagreed with Trotsky.
On 26th October, the Red Guards seized key points of Petrogad and stormed the provisional government headquarters and the Palace. Kerensky fled the city at the last moment, narrowly avoiding capture. The following day Lenin announced the overthrow of the provisional government at the second Congress of All Soviets. The battle for the complete liberation of Russia was however not over.
The next months were marked by war against counter revolutionary white Russian forces. In July 1918, the Tsar family was gutted in a cellar as the white forces were approaching where the Tsar family was kept. Some whites wanted to put Tsar Nicholas back in the throne. The Tsar, wife, their son Alex, daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, their four servants and a dog were executed. This civil war resulted in two (2) million soldiers losing their lives. Typhus epidemic and famine claimed the lives of a further 9 million lives.
The Bolshevik regime fought against the insurgency to defend the Revolution. The insurgency included the Mensheviks and the factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Therefore the Russian Civil War (1917-22) had left wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks. This happened in the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), before becoming part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) IN 1922.
Trotsky was in charge of the revolutionary army, “the red army” which played a leading role in delivering victory to the Bolsheviks in the cluster of civil wars that took place. By the close of 1920, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious under Lenin’s uncompromising and determined stewardship. They built a new socialist order which became a super power after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. The Bolshevik party was renamed the Communist Party in 1918. The civil war went on for three (3) years.
The Bolshevik Red Guards and workers took over government offices and arrested the leaders of the provisional government. All private property and wealth was taken over and distribute among the peasantry. There was nationalization of large industrial enterprises. The Soviet Union established a foreign-trade monopoly to allow the productive co-ordination of the national economy, and so prevent Russian national industries from competing against each other. War Communism (1918-21) was introduced so as to allow for adequate supplies of food and weapons in the Russian Civil War.
This was followed by the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-29), which allowed measures of private commerce, internal free trade, and replaced grain requisitions with an agricultural tax, under the management of State banks. This free trade in industry and agriculture was allowed a considerable field of possibilities in which to develop, while the proletarian government retained control of the key industries, state, banking. Nationalization of the land remained and the state held a monopoly of foreign trade. The policy was meant to mend ties between the workers and peasants and was necessary, for the Russian people to survive after the ravages of the two destructive wars that had badly impacted the country.
The NEP sought to resolve food-shortage riots among the peasantry, and allowed measures of private enterprise, wherein the profit motive encouraged the peasants to harvest the crops required to feed the people of town and country; and to economically re-establish the urban working class, who had lost many men (workers) to the counter-revolutionary Civil War. With the NEP, the socialist nationalisation of the economy could then be developed to industrialise Russia, strengthen the working class, and raise standards of living; thus the NEP would advance socialism against capitalism. Lenin regarded the appearance of new socialist states in the developed countries as necessary to the strengthening Russia’s economy, and the eventual development of socialism. In that, he was encouraged by the German Revolution of 1918-1919, the Italian insurrection and general strikes of 1920, and industrial unrest in Britain, France, and the U.S.
In 1928 the NEP was succeeded by the first Five Year Plan and subsequent forced collectivization of the land. It was adapted on Lenin’s initiative by the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of Russia, early in 1921, and reinforced at the Tenth Party Conference in May of the same year.
Under Soviet government, the Soviet Union, a country the size of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, moved out of the middle ages and into the modern era. Within this period of transformation, the Soviet Union took on the might of Nazi Germany ÔÇô industrially the most advanced country in Europe at that time and defeated it in the most terrible war in history, the Second World War. As contained in the slogan, “Freedom in Discussion, Unity in Action”, Lenin followed the First International (IWA, International Workingmen’s Association, 1864ÔÇô1876), and lead the Bolsheviks as a democratically centralised vanguard party, wherein free political-speech was allowed until policy consensus. Following that, every member of the Party would be expected to uphold the official policy established in consensus. In the pamphlet Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action (1905), Lenin said:
“Of course, the application of this principle in practice will sometimes give rise to disputes and misunderstandings; but only on the basis of this principle can all disputes and all misunderstandings be settled honourably for the Party…. The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.”
Full inner-party democratic debate was Bolshevik Party practice under Lenin, even after the banning of party factions in 1921. Although a guiding influence in policy, Lenin did not exercise absolute power, and continually debated and discussed to have his point of view accepted. Under Stalin, the inner-party practice of democratic free debate did not continue after the death of Lenin in 1924.
Lenin had in 1919, as the leader of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1923 established the Communist International to which all Communist Parties were affiliated. In 1927, a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) from Cape Town, James La Guma proposed that South Africa should become a native republic with equal rights for all races. He took this proposal to the Communist International, which adopted the idea in 1928, and from 1929 it became SACP policy in South Africa. The Communist Party was the first non-racial political organisation in South Africa, and based on this the first to call for a democratic republic with equal rights for all races.
It was the Soviet Union which gave arms and training to liberation movements of Southern Africa, MPLA in Angola, Frelimo in Mozambique, Zapu in Zimbabwe, Swapo in Namibia and the SACP-ANC in South Africa. It is well known that massive support was given by the Soviet Union and other countries that adopted socialism. It was not only military assistance; those countries provided training for medical doctors, engineers and administrators for future peaceful development. Meanwhile, Western imperialist powers such as the United States listed the whole of the liberation struggle and social emancipation, the movement and its leaders as terrorist.
We should acknowledge that Western imperialist regime change agenda exists and is alive and that Russia has provided the necessary counter-balance to it. The fight and repulsion of this devious agenda should not make us chase our own shadows, become paranoid and treat every criticism with contempt and vilification. We must unite to defeat this imperialist agenda, the primary source of our social slavery and economic exploitation. This is why we must also wage a relentless struggle against counterfeit anti-imperialism, a tendency basically characterised by the emergence of elitist groupings that commit wrongdoing and pigeonhole everyone who calls them to order and accuse them of being a third force, working with the Americans/ British that seeks to overthrow the rulers.
The Russian revolution through the practical application of the socio-political conditions of Russia in the twentieth century combined with the theory of the organization of a revolutionary vanguard party to attain dictatorship of the proletariat. This lead to the establishment of Socialism which in turn gave rise to Leninism. Leninism was composed as and for revolutionary process, and originally was neither a rigorously proper philosophy nor a discrete political theory; after the Russian Revolution, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), Gyorgy Lukas developed and organised Lenin’s pragmatic revolutionary practices and ideology into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution (Leninism). As a political-science term, Leninism entered common usage in 1922, after infirmity ended Lenin’s participation in governing the Russian Communist Party. Two years later, in July 1924, at the fifth congress of the communist International, Grigory Zinoviev popularized the term Leninism to denote “vanguard-party revolution”.
Gyorgy Lukacs, the Hungarian philosopher in his book, defined Leninism as the political theory for the organization of a revolutionary vanguard and the achievement of a dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of Socialism. He sees Leninism as a combination between Marxism and Lenin’s interpretations of Marxist theories for practical application to the socio-political conditions of the Russian Empire of the early 20th century. The vanguard party was meant to guide the workers on theory and organizational skills and provide revolutionary leadership.
In the 1925ÔÇô29 period, Joseph Stalin made Leninism the official and only legitimate form of Marxism in Russia. He combined the political philosophies of Marxism and Leninism and called this the state theory of the Soviet Union.
