The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism” |
In a real sense, this is the payoff on the whole question of the meaning of Lenin’s slogan: With the March Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of tsarism, Lenin dropped defeatism and the defeat-slogan completely. The fact itself speaks volumes. A closer examination will underline the essential points we have already made. This period provides a test.
The first words preserved from Lenin’s pen, after the news of the March revolution, are a letter to Kollontai, in which he wrote: “We, of course, retain our opposition to the defense of the fatherland, to the imperialist slaughter directed by Shingarev plus the Kerenskys and Co. All our slogans remain the same ...” [101]
“All our slogans” did not remain the same. The Bolsheviks remained consistently opposed to the war, even now when it was being conducted by a democratic republic of the capitalists; in fact, they had to re-emphasize their opposition to defensism twice as energetically. But on point after point where the Bolsheviks had differed from the other left-wing Marxist internationalists, Lenin revised his distinctive position: the peace slogan, the slogan “turn imperialist war into civil war”, and the defeat-slogan.
Lenin’s explicit statement on his abandonment of defeatism in this period did not come until exactly a year later, in March 1918, after the revolution. Let us record it now. The subject came up almost accidentally, at the special Congress of Soviets called to ratify the Brest-Litovsk treaty of peace with Germany. The S-Rs were against peace and for continuation of the war in spite of the complete exhaustion of the country. In reply to a speech by the Left S-R Kamkov about disrupting the army, Lenin remarked in passing:
“He [Kamkov] heard that we were defeatists, and he reminded himself of this when we have ceased to be defeatists ... We were defeatists under the tsar, but under Tseretelli and Chernov [i.e., under the Kerensky regime] we were not defeatists.” [102]
Lenin uses “under Tseretelli and Chernov” (S-R ministers in the cabinet) to denote the period from March to November 1917 because of the context of Kamkov’s speech, not for any special reason which need concern us. But he never explicitly discussed the reasons for this change, any more (for example) than he ever discussed the simultaneous revision of his opinions on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. [17*]
The abandonment of the defeat-slogan, in any case, is a clear fact even without this categorical statement. It remains to see (a) why, and (b) what took its place. The latter is an especially interesting question. During this period, the Bolsheviks were what they had denied was possible: consistently anti-war without being defeatists.
Insofar as comrades in the movement have thought of this question, it is probable that the change has been viewed as solely an accompaniment of the phenomenon of dual power. That opinion does not quite stand up.
First of all, we must not underestimate the fact that Lenin had spent the war years in Switzerland, a neutral country: here there were no war atmosphere, no war hysteria, no climate of patriotism, no clouds of social-patriotism of the sort that swirled about the head of Trotsky in Paris or the German Left.
It was not until he returned to Russia on April 16 that Lenin for the first time got a bath in the atmosphere of the social-patriotism of the masses. Read his works from 1914 through 1916 and it is evident that, in his thinking, this, the social-patriotism of the rank and file appears simply as a consequence of betrayal from above. It does not play a conditioning role in his formulation of slogans. Lenin’s main emphasis is constantly to draw the hardest, sharpest line against the pro-war leaders and anyone who makes concessions to them. Only rarely does he seem to pay attention to a task which is different: how to bridge the gap between the intransigent line of opposition to the war and the thinking of the masses of workers who are under the spell of defensism, how to present his ideas to them. One of the big differences in tone between Lenin’s writings on the war and those of (say) Luxemburg or Trotsky is conditioned by this fact.
With Lenin back in Petersburg, many Bolshevik memoirs speak of his eagerness to talk to workers, get a feeling of how the people were thinking and talking. He needed it. He was going to find out the “hidden thoughts” about which he had once written so confidently.
What struck him with a fresh and new impact? It was not in the first place the phenomenon of dual power, which looms so much bigger in historical perspective.
The day after his return, he presented theses and made a speech at a caucus meeting of the Bolshevik membprs of the All-Russian Soviet Congress. [103] Here he began to sound the keynote which ran through his speeches and writings from then on, up to the, July days:
“What strikes one particularly is that here in Russia the situation in the socialist movement is the same as in other countries: defensism, ‘saving the fatherland’. The difference is that nowhere is there the degree of freedom we have ...”
And another thing: “The masses approach the question [of the war] not from a theoretical but from a practical viewpoint. Our mistake lies in our theoretical approach ... Before the representatives of the soldiers the matter must be put in a practical way, otherwise nothing will come of it.”
What was this new “practical” approach? “In view of the apparent existence of a defensist sentiment among the masses who accept the war only as a necessity and not as an excuse for making conquests, we must explain to them thoroughly, persistently, and patiently [that the war can be ended only by overthrowing capital] ... When the worker says he wants to defend his country, it is the instinct of an oppressed man that speaks in him.”
A backlight is cast on the approach which he had pursued up to this enlightenment. This was obviously a personal revelation for him. But it was not new or startling for the anti-war socialists in various countries who were immersed in the tidal wave of social-patriotism that had swept over their people. Lenin is “struck” (“hit between the eyes”, says another translation) by the fact that there is defensism in Russia too – not just in, the writings of Plekhanov or Semkovsky or some other politico who should have known better-deeply among the masses. The “Practical” problem is how, to reach them, not by Modifying one’s intransigent opposition to the war but making it comprehensible to them, making it march with their own thinking. He criticizes his previously too “theoretical” approach, but that is not just or accurate. He means his previously too abstract approach, which is not at all the same thing. It was this abstract insistence on hard formulations (not merely on “hard” ideas) which had shown itself in some of his strictures on the slogan of peace, on Luxemburg’s “Junius” pamphlet, on the slogan of defeat, in his insistence on counterposing “civil war” as a slogan to the masses’ yearning for peace and an end to war.
Now he emphasizes and scolds his followers: “We Bolsheviks are in the habit of adopting a maximum of revolutionism. But this is not enough. We must study the situation.” [104]
In this whole period this is a repeated note sounded by Lenin, ostensibly with regard to a “peculiarity” of the Russian situation in 1917. This peculiarity is not merely the existence of dual power, which, to be sure, is “what has made our revolution so strikingly unique”, as he says in one place. [105] It is something else which, in Russia, was an accompaniment of the dual power and a consequence of the revolution, but which is not merely dual power.
This, Lenin emphasizes on occasion after occasion, is the political freedom, which now obtains. Is this any reason for supporting the war of this “free” capitalist country? Of course not. Its impact on Lenin is rather this: it means that if the masses are defensist, they are so not because of constraint by the government but, as it were, of their own free will. They cannot be cured of this by “a maximum of revolutionism”, or by slogans which are designed merely to demarcate, or by appeals to the Basle and Stuttgart resolutions. Slogans which previously seemed to him to be dangerous concessions to social-patriotism now take on a new color as a necessary bridge to the social-patriotism of the masses, as a “practical” approach.
The acquisition of capitalist “freedom” in Russia, then, does not provide any reason to modify views on the war. It is reason to modify how one approaches the masses in seeking to tear them away from their defensist illusions. He comes back to it time and again for months. He tells the Bolshevik caucus on April 17: “Russia at present is the freest, the most advanced country in the world.” [106]
He writes in his April 10 theses that the revolution has stalled “not because of outside obstacles, not because the bourgeoisie uses force ... but simply by the unthinking confidence of the masses”. [107] And again on April 27: “Complete political freedom, we have not of course. But nowhere else is there such freedom as exists in Russia.” [108]
Now he is emphasizing this in connection with the problem of how to deal with the defensist sentiments of the mass of workers. Because the picture impressed him as unique, this “conscientious” (“sincere”) revolutionary-defensism of the masses seemed to him a new phenomenon, peculiar to Russia. Thus he writes in a passage which well represents this course of thought:
“When I spoke of the ‘conscientious’ mass of revolutionary defensists, I had in mind not a moral category, but a class definition. The class represented in the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies is not interested in a predatory war. In Europe it is different ...”
We interrupt the quotation to ask: What! in Europe, then, the working class is interested in a predatory imperialist war? But no: Lenin has just jumped the track to a different line of thought, and goes straight on into the following:
“... There the people are oppressed, the most opportunistic pacifists are not infrequently baited even more than we, the Pravdists. Here the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies carries its policy of revolutionary defensism into effect, not by violence, but because the masses trust it. Europe is one large military prison. Capital rule cruelly there. All over Europe the bourgeoisie should be overthrown, and not argued with. In Russia the soldiers are armed; they allowed the bourgeoisie to beguile them peacefully when they agreed ostensibly only to ‘defend themselves’ against Wilhelm. In Europe, there is no ‘conscientious’ revolutionary defensism, of the sort we have in Russia, where the people have handed over the power to the bourgeoisie, because of ignorance, inertia, the habit to suffer the rod, tradition.” [109]
Now this portrait of the rest of Europe is a caricature even for the year 1917, when anti-war feeling was already germinating all over the Continent and was held back among other things by “sincere” “conscientious” defensism. Qualitatively, the situation which Lenin thinks is a Russian peculiarity was true of the working class of most of Europe in 1914-15. In Germany, Austria and France most particularly, the governments had put their war policy through not by violence but by deceiving the masses (it goes without saying, with the indispensable help of the social-democratic leaders). There too the masses were “peacefully” beguiled into believing that they had to “defend themselves” against a foreign oppressor or would-be oppressor. There too, “conscientious” defensism was based on misconceived class interests.
What Lenin is unwittingly explaining is what he had not really grasped about the problem up to now – the problem, that is, not of whether to support or oppose the war, but the sometimes even more difficult problem of how to present an uncomproinising anti-war line to the masses.
So again on May 10, in his speech oil the war resolution at the “April Conference”, he speaks of “... the peculiarity that distinguishes Russia from the other capitalist Western countries, and from all the capitalist democratic republics. For it cannot be said of those countries that it is the confidence of the ignorant masses that chiefly makes it possible to prolong the war. There the masses are in the iron grip of military discipline.” [110]
Even in May 1917 this was not true in France and England and not even in the Central Powers, let alone its arrant absurdity as a picture of Europe in 1914-16. But it serves the role of allowing Lenin to adopt a new policy without having to face up to what was wrong in the old. For it is on the basis of this new line of thinking that Lenin drops the defeatist formulas.
Clearly this step was not just a matter of reluctance to use “strong” language, that is, it was not just a matter of tactically dropping the term. His new approach left no room for it.
Thus, it is impossible to “wish defeat” and at the same time to project the idea of transforming the imperialist war into a revolutionary war. At the same time that Lenin was vigorously fighting defensism under this government, he was offering a program of how to defend the country:
“The example of France tells us one thing and one only: to make Russia capable of defending herself, to achieve ‘marvels’ of mass heroism here, all the old must be swept away with ‘Jacobin’ ruthlessness. Russia must be rejuvenated, regenerated economically. And this cannot be done in the 20th century by merely sweeping away tsarism ...
“It is impossible to render the country capable of defending itself without the greatest heroism on the part of the people in courageously and decisively carrying out great economic transformations. And it is impossible to appeal to the heroism of the masses without breaking with imperialism, without offering to all the peoples a democratic peace, without thus transforming the war from a war of conquest, a predatory, criminal war, into a just, defensive, revolutionary war.
“Only a decisively consistent break with the capitalists both in internal and foreign politics can save our revolution and our country, held in the iron grasp of imperialism.” [111]
At this point, we must take a flashback. We have just seen Lenin urging revolution in order to be able really to defend the country. He had also run into this question in 1915, when he denounced “the revolutionary chauvinists, who desire revolution in order to defeat Germany”, whereas (he continued) we “desire the revolution in Russia for the sake of the proletarian revolution in the West, and simultaneously with that revolution.” [112] It was a false dichotomy. Again in a letter of September 1915 he had drawn a line against the “chauvinist revolutionaries” (among whom he names Kerensky and some Mensheviks) or “revolutionary-patriots”, who “want to overthrow tsarism so as to defeat Germany, whereas “we are working for the international revolution of the proletariat”. [113]
A false dichotomy, indeed. Lenin had missed the point about “revolutionary chauvinism” and understood it only in 1917, when in a sense he too became a “revolutionary-patriot”. The point was that the “revolutionary chauvinists” still based themselves on imperialism, that is, their only condition was the overthrow of tsarism while the war would still be conducted on a purely capitalist basis and in capitalist-imperialist interests. Lenin’s condition in 1917 was “breaking with imperialism” – really breaking with imperialism, and not only in words but in class terms. And in this difference everything is included.
Without ceasing for a moment to oppose the imperialist war being waged by the new democratic government of the capitalists; without ceasing for a moment to concentrate all fire against any kind of defensism under this government, Lenin recognized that the working class had a stake in the defense of the nation. His program for the defense of the nation was a thoroughly revolutionary program: the real interests of the people can be defended, not by supporting the war, but only if capitalism is overthrown and a fundamental break with iniperialism takes place.
It is superfluous to point out how utterly alien to this viewpoint is the slogan “wish defeat”. No Wonder it disappeared as thoroughly as an icicle in fire. It can also be understood why, far from “wishing defeat” any longer, Lenin and the Bolsheviks repudiated the related idea of wishing to disintegrate the army. (Fraternization, yes; but fraternization as a means of bringing about peace from below, not as a means of disintegrating the army.)
Lenin’s clearest expression on this point, it happens, came (later, after the revolution, in 1918) in the same passage that we have already quoted in the dispute over Brest-Litovsk with the S-R Kamkov. [114] The S-R debater had referred to “disrupting the army” in 1917. Lenin replied:
“But how did we disrupt the army? We were defeatists under the tsar, but under Tseretelli and Chernov we were not defeatists. We came out in Pravda with a proclamation which Krylenko, then still persecuted, published in the army: Why I Go to Petersburg. He said: ‘To revolt we do not call you.’ This was not the disintegration of the army. The army was disrupted by those who declared this great war [i.e., by the imperialists who had brought the war on] ... And I assert here that we – beginning with this proclamation by Krylenko, which was not the first and which I mention because I especially remember it – we did not disrupt the army but said: Hold the front – the sooner you will take the power, the easier you will maintain it ...” [18*]
In May 1917 Lenin, calling on the peasants to take the land, added that they should do so “using every effort to increase the production of grain and meat, for our soldiers at the front are suffering terribly from hunger”. He told them to take the land themselves and work it well because: “This is necessary in order to improve the provisioning of the soldiers at the front.” [115]
In September 1917 he wrote that the historic significance of the Kornilov revolt was that it showed people
“... that the landowners and the bourgeoisie ... are now ready to commit, and are committing, the most outlandish crimes, such as giving up Riga (and afterwards Petrograd) to the Germans, laying the war front open, putting the Bolshevik regiments under fire, starting a mutiny, leading troops against the capital with the ‘Wild Division’ at their head, etc. – all in order to seize all power and put it in the hands of the bourgeoisie ...” [116]
Trotsky in September 1917 (now a leading spokesman for the Bolsheviks) wrote in the same vein in a pamphlet:
“The people and the army, if they felt and were convinced that the Revolution was their revolution, that the government was their government, that the latter would stop at nothing in the defense of their interests against the exploiters, that it was pursuing no external aims of oppression or conquest, that it was not curtsying to the ‘Allied’ financiers, that it was openly offering the nations an immediate peace on democratic foundations – the toiling masses and their army would, under these conditions, be found to be inspired with an indissoluble unity; and if the German revolution would not come in time to aid us, the Russian army would fight against the Hohenzollerns with the same enthusiasm that the Russian workers showed in defending the gains of the popular movement against the onslaughts of the counter-revolution. The imperialists feared this path as they feared death ...” [117]
All this is highlighted from another angle by the attitude of the Bolsheviks on the “July offensive”. We have seen how Lenin had begun by emphasizing the democratic freedom that obtained in Russia after March. But his line on the war was not directly produced by this factor, even though this was what had “struck” him. What motivated his new line on the war, directly, was rather the accompanying phenomenon of “conscientious” defensism – that is, the necessity of shaping a policy of revolutionary anti-war opposition which would mesh with the thinking of the masses.
Proof: After the “July days”, when the Kerensky government began to persecute the Bolsheviks and drive them underground, Lenin openly proclaimed that the freedom he had spoken about was now no more:
“The counter-revolution ... has actually taken state power into its hands ... Fundamentally, state power in Russia is at present actually a military dictatorship ... All hopes for a peaceful development of the Russian revolution have definitely vanished ...” [118]
The dual power was no more, also. So the slogan “All power to the Soviets” temporarily went too. [119]
Now this analysis may have been an exaggeration, but the point is that with this analysis, Lenin’s new line on the war did not change back, with respect to defeatism. It was not decisively based on the phenomenon of dual power.
The fact that the new line continued as before is best shown by the Bolsheviks’ reaction when the Kerensky government carried through its new offensive on the front beginning July 1 and met with a resounding defeat.
The Bolsheviks said the defeat was a catastrophe for the country and that the offensive had been a crime. In the pamphlet of September 1917 by Trotsky, quoted above, he refers to it strongly as “a fierce catastrophe at the front”. The offensive, he wrote, had set new goals for the army and
“... in the name of these goals it was demanded that the army, exhausted, hungry and unshod as it was, should put forward superhuman efforts. Can there be any doubt of the result when we remember, in addition, that certain generals of the staff were consciously working for a Russian defeat.” [120]
The Bolsheviks had declared warningly in the Congress of Soviets (Trotsky recalled) “that in the present state of the army an offensive was a military adventure, which threatened the very existence of the army itself. It transpired that we had seen only too clearly”.
It is consequently quite clear that the “glorious page” of the offensive of the 1st of July has no relation whatever to national defense, for the military efficiency of Russia, as the consequence of the offensive, had simply been made worse. If the bourgeoisie nevertheless speaks of the offensive in terms of approbation, it is for the simple reason that the cruel blow inflicted on our army as a result of Kerensky’s policy created favorable conditions for the spread of panic and for counter-revolutionary schemes. [121]
Yes indeed, “defeat facilitates” ... many things. Lenin, during this period, had to make the point that military defeat at the front was dangerously facilitating ... Bonapartism. He made this point precisely in the situation created by the “July Days” at the same time that he was announcing the end of dual power, democratic freedom, etc. In his article “The Beginning of Bonapartism”, he showed how a state of balanced equilibrium in the class struggle produces the classic soil of Bonapartism, and went on:
“Add to this the fact of military defeat brought about by a foolhardy offensive, when phrases about saving the fatherland are bandied about (concealing the desires of the bourgeoisie to, save its imperialist program), and you have before you a perfect picture of the social and political setting for Bonapartism.” [122]
It turns out, naturally, that the formula “defeat facilitates revolution” – quite apart from the fact that it is not even any version of a real defeatism is not the suprahistorical principle that Lenin’s polemics had made it out to be. What defeat facilitates is various, and is conditioned by the “social and political setting” in which it occurs.
As a matter of fact, while we are at it, let us get another view of how, in 1917, Lenin was using formulas of the type “defeat facilitates revolution”. In September Lenin wrote, for example:
“Needless to say, the approaching famine, economic ruin, military defeat, are capable of extraordinarily hastening this turn towards the transition of power to the proletariat supported by the poorest peasantry.” [123]
At first blush, this sounds as if it is ill contradiction with the previously quoted remark about defeat facilitating Bonapartism. But there is no necessary contradiction at all. Military defeat, by itself, facilitates breakdown of the status quo, and that is all, but what will replace the status quo depends on other factors. Together with famine and economic ruin, it can quicken the pace of a revolutionary development which is taking place – just as it can quicken other things. [19*]
But the most biting comment that this makes on Lenin’s old Formula No.2 of “defeatism” in 1914-16 is this: Previously, Lenin had deduced from the fact that “defeat facilitates revolution” the conclusion that we therefore “wish defeat”. It was an “axiom”. He could not see how anyone could fail to see the unanswerable logic. Now – as was just as clear before – “famine” and “economic ruin” are also acting as “facilitators” of revolution. It was an objective fact, put by Lenin with rigorous correctness. And it would plainly be mad to conclude from this objective fact that we therefore “wish” famine and ruin! On the contrary, Lenin was fighting for the only program to avert the “threatening catastrophe”.
There was only one little catch in this program as far as concerns the defensists – “revolutionary” defensists, “conscientious” defensists or any other kind of defensists: Lenin’s program to defend Russia, to avert the catastrophe, etc. was not any rationalization why workers should be defensists in the present under the imperialist government, but was a revolutionary program for the overthrow of imperialism and capitalism.
And this program was incompatible with any variety of defeatism.
To sum up:
It is not enough merely to point out that Lenin dropped defeatism after the March Revolution. Why he did so, and the program that took its place, is even more illuminating about the mistake of 1914-16.
Lenin dropped defeatism, first of all, in the face of the realization, made vivid to him for the first time, that the defeat-slogan broke all links between the sentiments and interests of the masses and the program of the consistent revolutionaries. In this sense, it was sectarian; and in our opinion the defeat-slogan deserves to be recorded as a classic example of a sectarian shell built around an opportunistic (i.e., in this case social-patriotic) theoretical core, in line with the oft-repeated Marxist truism of the dialectic relationship between the sectarian-opportunist opposites.
Secondly, Lenin discovered in practice that the defeat-slogan was incompatible with a living Marxist approach to the problem of the defense of the nation, conceived not in the social-patriotic sense of the “defense of the fatherland” but in the light of a Marxist class understanding of, and a dynamically revolutionary program for, the nation.
Thirdly: Lenin’s change of line after the democratic (but not socialist) revolution in March reflects the fact – which we have already seen – that the defeat-slogan had a meaning only in terms of a war by the tsarist feudal despotism against a progressive capitalist revolutionary force. This was the situation which Lenin thought obtained in 1904-5, and though he was wrong even then, the defeat-slogan had a clear meaning for him, at least. It was this same arrière pensée which had led Zinoviev to write the qualification “despotic” into his defeatist formulations. The March democratic revolution erased the rock-bottom motive which had led to the defeat-slogan in the first place – the “special Russian” consideration of tsarism as the unique menace, the greatest evil. Naturally, this does not bear on conscious motivation but only on the real theoretical underpinnings, which have their effect despite consciousness.
Fourthly: Lenin’s course proved that defeatism is not any necessary element in a consistent revolutionary anti-war position.
It remains now to follow the history of “revolutionary defeatism” after the First World War, and, most especially, after Lenin. In fact, it is from the reinterpretation that took place in this period that the recent couple of generations of Marxists have taken their ideas on the subject. We have to see why and how this re-interpretation took place.
17*. Yet he must have been baited by enemies about the previous defeatist line of the Bolsheviks. In an article published in September, Lenin mentions that a campaign has been started against Chernov, the S-R leader and right-wing Zimmerwaldist, “for his alleged ‘defeatist’ articles abroad”. (CW 21, I, p.111.) Needless to say, Chernov was not guilty. But if this smear campaign was launched against him, we can conjecture that Lenin’s authentic defeatist declarations must have been used too. If so, Lenin never riposted or tried to clear the question up. Unless the above-mentioned article, entitled Political Blackmail, was a sort of backhanded way of striking back.
18*. A distinction has to be made at this point between two concepts: (1) the progam of revolution and break with imperialism in order to defend Russia; and (2) even before that revolution, the slogan of “Hold the front” now. The second aspect is, without any doubt, uniquely a reflection of the dual power, in the sense that Trotsky explains in his History of the Russian Revolution apropos of the defense of Petrograd against the Germans. The previous remark we made, above, that the abandonment of defeatism was not conditioned on the dual power, does not apply to this feature of Bolshevik policy.
19*. Cf. also: “... war and economic ruin will hasten the process [of revolutionization] tremendously. These are such ‘hasteners’ that a month or even a week with them is equal to a year otherwise.” (CW21, I, p.48.) And: “That the present imperialist war, by its reactionary character and the hardships it entails, revolutionizes the masses and accelerates the revolution, is true and should be emphasized.” (CW21, II, p.82.)
101. CW20, I, p.19, Two Letters to A.M. Kollontai. Not published; private letter.
102. CW22 (Russ.), pp.404-5, Concluding Speech on the Report on the Ratification of the Peace Agreement of March 15, at the 4th Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Soviets; pub. March 19, 1918.
103. CW20, I, pp.95-7, Speech at Caucus of Bolshevik Members of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets, April 17, 1917. Not published (till 1924); notes by a participant.
104. Ibid., p.99.
105. CW20, I, p.115.
106. CW20, I, p.98.
107. CW20, I, p.135, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution.
108. CW20, I, p.203, “Report on the Political Situation”.
109. Ibid., p.202.
110. CW20, I, p.296-7, Speech on the War Resolution.
111. CW21, I, p.214-6, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It; pub. Oct. 1917 (written September 23-7).
112. Lenin, Selected Works, vol.5, p.150.
113. Letter to Shlyapnikov of September 19, 1915, in Letters of Lenin (see note 72), pp.376-7.
114. See note 102.
115. CW20, II, pp.56-7, Open Letter to the Delegates of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasant Delegates; pub. May 24, 1917.
116. CW21, I, p.160, Draft Resolution on the Political Situation. Not published (till 1926); written September 16, 1917.
117. L. Trotsky, What Next?, a pamphlet published in Petrograd in September 1917. Included in L. Fraina, ed., The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, by Lenin and Trotsky (a collection), p.257.
118. CW21, I, 36-37, The Political Situation. Not published (till 1926); written July 23, 1917.
119. Ibid., p.37.
120. In L. Fraina (see note 117), p.258.
121. Ibid., p.261.
122. CW21, I, p.77, The Beginning of Bonapartism. Pub. Aug. 11, 1917.
123. CW21, I, p.147, From a Publicist’s Diary; pub. September 1917.
Last updated on 25.9.2004