Chapter IV: Class Conflicts and Class Cooperations
The February Revolution was a so-called ‘bourgeois’ revolution because it had to fulfil all the tasks which had been accomplished in Western Europe by the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the leadership of the urban middle class. But the Russian peasants and workers were not contented with overthrowing the ancien régime . The great historical novelty of the February Revolution consists in the fact that after the victory workers and peasant-soldiers formed a stable and independent organisation destined to play a decisive role in the progress of the revolutionary movement. The bourgeoisie regarded the newly-formed Provisional Government as its political executive committee, but the workers and soldiers in both capitals, in industrial towns, in large garrisons, and even on the front, organised their own representative Councils or Soviets.
The period of ‘dyarchy’ of the Soviets and the Provisional Government lasted from March to October 1917—from the overthrow of Tsarism to the victory of the Bolsheviks. The government made up for the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Soviets by its obvious reluctance to tackle those tasks which according to historical tradition and political expediency ought to have monopolised its attention and the energies of its leaders. First and foremost among them ought to have been the complete reform of the Tsarist state which was far from being a rational, efficient and dependable administration for the very purposes of capital. The Provisional Government, however, did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, as far as it could it tried by foul means or fair to maintain or restore the authority of the Tsarist bureaucracy, for the old Tsarist state machine, and particularly the reactionary officer caste, seemed to be the sole remaining power capable of saving government and society from the impending ‘chaos’.
As the bourgeoisie and its spokesmen in the Provisional Government welcomed the victory of the revolution only the other day with much pathos and little taste, this attitude was very surprising indeed. The reason for its failure as a revolutionary leader was, however, near at hand. After the downfall of Tsarism the urban middle class was confronted by two enemies, either of whom was too strong for it. The working class, although according to all historical precedents engaged in a bourgeois revolution, clearly asked for more than merely free organisation, political parties and trade unions, the right to strike and to make propaganda for its programme. Its openly-proclaimed aim was not more and not less than the expropriation of the capitalists—and it was against this danger that Big Business appealed to the one power which seemed capable of maintaining its privileges—the ‘law and order’ of Tsarism and the remnants of its political and military machine.
This tendency was accentuated by the serious course of events in the Russian village. Anarchy had taken possession of the very basis of Russian society; the peasants rose, and the movement of the villages shook the ground under the feet of the capitalists. In Western Europe, the liberation of the peasants had been one of the fundamental tasks of the ‘bourgeois’ revolution and its best protection against feudal restoration. But the Russian bourgeoisie was intimately connected with the feudal aristocracy, and the confiscation of landed property was dreaded by the bourgeoisie not less than by the landlords.
The clash of interests between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the leaders of business and finance on the other was not less direct in the most important political problem of the day—the liquidation of the war. Only the business classes were interested in the continuance of the war and wanted to go on with it after the fall of Tsarism, whose military failure more than anything else had driven them into opposition to the Tsar. After the victory of the revolution they tried hard to keep Russia in the war. This attempt produced a deadly conflict between the Provisional Government and the peasant army, which demanded peace at any price, left the trenches and spread the spirit of rebellion against the authorities of yesterday through the endless plains of Russia.
Anarchy meant workers’ control in industry, expropriation of the landowners by the peasants, end of the war owing to the defeatism of the people. The middle class was quickly faced by the most serious alternative. ‘Kornilov or Lenin?’ it was asked by its logically-minded leader, Miliukov, and the answer to this question was never in doubt. The bourgeoisie was not only unable to lead the revolution, its fundamental interests were incompatible with the very fact of the revolution itself. It chose Kornilov and counter-revolution.
On the other side, the logic of events created a firm united front of the peasants and the urban workers. The world war itself drew the peasants into the limelight of politics. After the breakdown of Tsarism they declined to continue their passive role as cannon fodder and hurried back from the front with elemental force. The social consequences of the revolution greatly intensified this process, for the peasants at home started at once to prepare the new distribution of the land, and nobody wanted to miss this opportunity.
It is not necessary to ponder about the mystic of the Russian soul in order to appraise the immense dangers of the elemental peasant movement for Russia’s future. The Russian peasants were certainly revolutionary; but they were much too backward to work out a working scheme for the running of agriculture and, even less, for the complicated mechanism of national economy as a whole. Scattered in millions of tiny farms working mainly for the satisfaction of their own needs and loosely connected with a market whose laws they did not understand, they were unable to rule the country. Their revolution was, therefore, nothing but the destruction of all the instruments of oppression and of the ruling classes themselves: assassination of landlords, officials, and policemen, burning of manors, courts of law and administrative buildings, etc. This paroxysm of revolutionary but purely negative energy would certainly be followed by complete chaos, and finally by the dictatorship of the sword. Thus the peasants, too, were unable to lead the revolution, that is, to solve the problems which had made it inevitable.
The industrial workers, on the other hand, despite their political maturity and revolutionary resolution, were numerically much too weak to stage a successful Socialist revolution. They could not hope to break the power of their adversaries except by a coalition with the peasants. The negative interests of the workers were the same as those of the peasants: both had been oppressed by the Tsarist regime, both had been driven into a war not of their own making, both wanted peace at any price. By supporting the peasants’ struggle against war and landlords, the workers did not sacrifice any principle of their own, and won the leadership of the revolution.
On the other hand, the positive aims of the peasants were not at all those of the workers. The peasants wanted simply to make a new distribution of the land minus the landlords, and to get rid of the enormous financial burdens which they had been carrying under Tsarism. The workers were taught by their own experience and by the propaganda of the Socialist parties that a thorough reorganisation of the whole economic system was required in order to raise their standard of living and free them from economic insecurity and political oppression. Thus they were striving for political power as the only means of avoiding economic collapse and political counter-revolution.
Chapter V: The Threatening Catastrophe
The terrific political conflagration following the downfall of Tsarism wrought havoc with the already disorganised economic system of the country.
The landlords played a very passive part in this process. The vast majority of them had no economic functions whatever, and simply lived on their revenues. The capitalists, on the other hand, were one of the decisive economic powers. Russian industry had been working at full speed for the war machine and received highly remunerative prices for goods of often mediocre quality. The prospect of peace or, in any case, of a cessation of hostilities made the captains of industry necessarily very cautious in their dispositions for the future, and caused a certain slowing down of industrial output. Even technically this was hardly to be avoided, for the breakdown of transport and currency was no longer to be disregarded. The railways were no longer able to transport raw materials and fuel, particularly oil and coal. The depreciation of the rouble together with the uncertain political outlook prevented sound calculations and invited the flight of capital over the Swedish border into safety. The gravest obstacle for the maintenance of industrial production on its war level from the capitalist point of view was, however, the rising power of the workers.
The success of the revolution was immediately followed by economic demands from the workers and corresponding concessions from the employers. The eight-hour day was recognised in both capitals a few days after the revolution. Wages were quickly increased, and the workers even demanded a certain limitation of the power of the management in all questions concerning the well-being of the workers.
At the same time the Socialist parties tried to reduce the abnormally high war profits of capital, although the abortive legislation of the Provisional Government was far less effective in this respect than the independent pressure by the workers. Thus profits were falling, and in many cases they were, indeed, completely disappearing. Every individual businessman was faced by the momentous decision either to continue production with falling profits or even at a loss, or to shut down his plant and to wait for better times. The employers began to counter the economic offensive of the workers by the weapon of lockouts. Industrial production slumped, while the economic position of the workers deteriorated and the shortage of manufactured goods increased; the revolutionary workers lost their jobs, and in the autumn of 1917, six months after the victory of the revolution, mass unemployment was the rule in all industrial centres.
The workers were incapable of coping with this emergency. They were neither willing nor able to take over the management of large-scale enterprises which were being closed by their lawful owners. Whenever the attempt was made, the factory committees were confronted by the same technical and economic problems which were at least partly responsible for the policy of the employers—lack of raw materials, fuel, etc, and lack of capital owing to the progressing depreciation of the currency. The fallacy of anarchist and syndicalist theories was quickly proved by this experience, and the workers found the Russia of the February Revolution economically even less to their taste than the Russia of the Tsars. By the logic of events they were compelled to concentrate all their energies on the breaking of this vicious circle by political action, by a change of the government which was completely helpless and overwhelmed by the stormy events of these decisive months.
At the time of the February Revolution, conditions in industry and agriculture, though far from favourable, were also far from hopeless. They certainly deteriorated quickly during the succeeding eight months, but the breakdown of the whole economic system was a consequence of the condition of transport and finance. During the two and a half war years inflation had been held within certain limits, although the currency system had been seriously undermined. On 1 March 1917, the wholesale price index stood at 330 (1913 = 100), whereas note circulation was six times higher than at the outbreak of the war. Between March and October this relation was completely upset: note circulation increased by ‘only’ 90 per cent, but prices rose by not less than 290 per cent. [1] The effects of Tsarist financial recklessness had been softened by the confidence of the possessing classes; their acute distrust of the revolution and the stability of the new order was one of the strongest motives for further inflation. Financial catastrophe was no longer threatening, it was already in full swing.
Since the outbreak of the war, the railways had been unable to fulfil their gigantic tasks. Military transport could go on only thanks to a radical reduction in civil transport. The full effects of this reckless exhaustion of the transport system were felt already during the revolution. The disorganisation of traffic was one of the reasons for the acute coal shortage, and it became impossible to send enough oil and coal from Baku and the Donets Basin to the capitals and the industrial centres. The same is true for the deterioration of the food situation. The richest grain provinces of the country—Siberia and the Ukraine—are hundreds of miles away from Moscow and Petrograd, and the position of the railways was particularly desperate during the autumn months, after the harvesting of the new crop.
The collapse of the economic system was sealed by the course of events in the country. The shortage of manufactured goods for rural consumption was the most important single reason for the food problems of the towns in 1916. This crisis was bound to grow in step with the reduction in industrial output and the progress of inflation. It was further intensified by a sharp reduction in agricultural production during the revolution which could have been prevented only, if at all, by a much more radical repetition of the famous night of 4 August 1789.
The landowners, whose estates had been suffering already for some years from the lack of agricultural labour, reduced their sown areas, or completely abandoned the cultivation of their land after the outbreak of the revolution. The peasants for their part concentrated their attention on watching every movement of their prospective victims and not on working the fields. Since the beginning of the revolution, peasant rebellions occurred frequently, resulting in the plundering of manors, burning of houses and forests, destruction of seeds and many valuable implements. The first wave of the peasant movement was checked by the temporary setback of the revolution which followed the armed July Demonstration in Petrograd; it returned, however, in the autumn, and by then it became irresistible.
By autumn the territory of the peasant struggle had become almost the whole country. Out of 624 counties constituting old Russia, 482 or 77 per cent were involved in the movement and omitting the borderlands distinguished by special agrarian conditions... out of 481 counties, 439, or 91 per cent, were drawn into the peasant revolt. [2]
This peasant war resulted in the complete destruction of large-scale agriculture, and thereby exerted a fateful influence on the future development of Russian economy. Apart from that it was a direct threat to the immediate food supply of the towns, and thereby increased the general upheaval.
The workers in the towns felt the full impact of these complications, and the soldiers were hardly in a better position. Living conditions deteriorated approximately according to the growth of the revolutionary movement, and its sabotage by the Provisional Government. Discontent increased as bread rations dwindled. In March ‘general’ bread rations in Petrograd were as high as one Russian pound (= 0.9 lb) a day, and nobody had to starve, though this diet was far from salutary; by August they had been reduced by one-half, and in the district of Moscow province even to two pounds (1 lb 12 oz) a week. [3] Famine threatened.
The next stage of the revolution was not the outcome of a blind and elemental movement of the masses, but the result of organised revolutionary action; it was therefore not preceded by hunger revolts. But the complete disorganisation of national economy and its immediate effects on the living conditions of the soldiers and the town workers had their share in producing the opportunity for the audacious and successful action of the Bolsheviks.
Chapter VI: The Problems of the Revolution and the Political Parties
I: The Constitutional Democrats
Under Tsarism, the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) had been the principal moderate opposition party representing the urban middle classes, businessmen and the prosperous intelligentsia. During the revolution they defended the interests of capital with all means at their disposal. For this fundamental reason their policy in the two decisive questions of the time, peace and agrarian reorganisation, was directly opposed to the demands of the people.
When the Provisional Government, at that time completely in their hands, for the first time actively opposed the demands of the Petrograd Soviet, this attempt ended with the resignation of the Cadet leader, Miliukov, and considerably radicalised the masses. Neither in this case nor later on was the influence of the Cadets based on their organisation or on their mass support, which was negligible, but on the fact that they were backed by the still formidable power of capital which used them as its instrument for political bargains and political blackmail.
In the course of these eight months the direct influence of the Cadets on the Provisional Government was greatly reduced by the insistence of the Soviets that the government should not contain any ‘capitalist ministers’. Nevertheless their real power over the government steadily increased behind the scenes. It may even be said that this power grew proportionately to their loss of mass support, for the uncomfortable position of the Socialist coalition parties on the fence became increasingly precarious; thus they were compelled to follow the lead of the consistent advocates of law and order who had at least the advantage of knowing their own mind.
During the first months of the revolution, capital and its Cadet agents tried to make the best of a bad job and granted liberal concessions, although from the very beginning a reactionary minority opposed any compromise with the devil. After some time the capitalists recognised, however, that it was not feasible to compromise with the revolution. They certainly succeeded in winning over to their point of view certain important sections of the revolutionary movement, but they soon found out that the masses left their former representatives when they recognised their change of front. Thus capital and the Cadets soon came to the conclusion that the only method of maintaining their privileges was the restoration of a strong executive power under their own rule. But this aim could be attained only by a successful counter-revolution.
II: Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
Before the February Revolution the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries did not seem to have very much in common. On the other hand, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, although at loggerheads about important problems and hostile ‘fractions’ of the Russian Social Democratic Party, were united in their struggle against the Social Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the practical policy of the Mensheviks after the February Revolution had much in common with that of the Social Revolutionaries, and was fundamentally opposed to that of the Bolsheviks.
The Social Revolutionaries were the party of agrarian revolution against Tsarism as the protector of agrarian feudalism and oppressor of the peasants. After the overthrow of the ancien régime, the great majority of the Social Revolutionaries found themselves in a tragi-comical quandary. They wanted to transform the Russian peasant into a prosperous farmer on the French model, unfettered by the relics of feudalism and free to increase his wealth by honest work and the opportunities which the growth of urban demand for his produce offers to him. Under the new order of things, trade and markets are, however, ruled by capitalist big business. Capitalist conditions are the necessary basis of ‘normal’ market conditions. Thus the Social Revolutionaries were faced by the bitter choice between an alliance with the capitalists, in which case they could not support the agrarian revolution which was their professed aim, and an alliance with the forces of social revolution for the achievement of agrarian revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. Their dominant right wing chose the former policy, whereas the Left Social Revolutionaries threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks.
The position of the Right-Wing Social Revolutionaries was very unfortunate indeed. They were the strongest group of the united Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet, and ruled its Peasants’ Section by a huge majority; in spite of that, the agrarian revolution progressed not through them, but exclusively against them. In the beginning of the revolution no problem was of greater interest to the peasants than the prohibition of land sales. The landowners foresaw the inevitable catastrophe, and wanted to sell out as quickly as possible, and the peasants demanded the immediate prohibition of all land sales.
The Provisional Government was at first openly hostile to this procedure. However, in the beginning of May the government was reconstructed, and V Chernov, the leader of the Social Revolutionaries, became Minister of Agriculture. His own description of the action taken by the government in this burning question makes melancholy reading:
On the eve of the first session of the Chief Land Committee, on 17 May, the Social Revolutionary Minister of Justice, Pereverzev, with Chernov telegraphed an administrative order to all notarial bureaus, stopping all dealings in land. But rumours spread persistently that on 25 May he had cancelled this order under pressure by the majority of the Provisional Government... On 7 June a new telegram of the Minister of Justice removed all prohibitions from tax contracts, purchases of non-agricultural land and several other classes of contracts. On 23 June he ordered ‘the circular instructions concerning land contracts repealed’. [4]
The peasants understood this object-lesson according to their lights: Social Revolutionaries and government apparently did not seriously want agrarian reform... It is highly probable that clear and energetic direction from above of the peasant movement would have succeeded in preventing the destruction of very expensive implements and the disappearance of large-scale agriculture with its higher productivity of labour. This chance was completely wrecked by the Provisional Government and the Social Revolutionaries.
The disappointment of the peasants with this policy of ‘their’ party was expressed partly by the growth of the Left-Wing Social Revolutionaries and partly by direct peasant action. The rebellions increased in size and intensity, and the refusal of well-planned and constructive reform provoked agrarian revolution as a blind elemental force with all the material and social damage inseparable from such a development. while practically the whole country was a prey to violent peasant revolts, the members of the government bargained about the conditions of a compromise between landlords and peasants. The more radical the peasant movement grew in the country, the more cowardly were its ‘representatives’ within the government.
The Social Revolutionaries were the agrarian experts of the Provisional Government; its general policy was at least in a negative manner determined by the Mensheviks. Though seriously dissatisfied with many of its features, the Mensheviks alone enabled Kerensky to carry on the government. Before the February Revolution the Mensheviks were at least as strong as the Bolsheviks in revolutionary ‘cadres’, and during the first months of the revolution they quickly surpassed their rivals in numbers and political influence. Up to the autumn coalitions of Mensheviks and Right-Wing Social Revolutionaries dominated all the most important Soviets.
The decisive political problem of the hour was the termination of the war. The Mensheviks violently disagreed amongst themselves as to their policy in this question. Their official leaders approved of Kerensky’s policy with certain reservations, but a Left minority, led by Martov, strongly advocated a speedy peace. This attitude of the leading Mensheviks discredited their party in the eyes of the workers and soldiers just as the inactivity of the official Social Revolutionaries discredited them with the peasants.
The Mensheviks were a Socialist party with Marxist inclinations, and were largely supported by industrial workers. But the leaders lagged sadly behind their followers. Already during the first fight for the eight-hour day many Soviets remained curiously inactive and left the struggle primarily to the workers themselves. More and more factories were closed down by their capitalist owners; unemployment grew apace, and the supply of foodstuffs and consumption goods fell from week to week. The continuation of industrial production without its old directors and managers became a problem of great urgency. Neither Soviets nor government acted.
The economic department of the Petrograd Soviet demanded the nationalisation of many important branches of industry; in spite of that nothing happened. On the other side, the Minister of Trade, himself a large textile manufacturer, and his energetic deputy, Palchinsky, an intelligent and resolute reactionary, actively organised the economic counterstroke of Big Business.
The workers had no choice but to prevent the closing down of important plants by their legitimate owners and to run them themselves. At first their factory committees had only the task of bargaining with the employers in all questions of immediate concern to the workers. Very soon, however, they developed a tendency to control the whole working of the enterprise in the interests of the workers. The Mensheviks failed in this important question not less than elsewhere to give the urgently needed lead.
When more and more plants were closed by their owners, the Menshevik Minister of Labour forbade the workers to meddle with the management of industry. But in spite of all ministerial orders and exhortations, promises and threats, the workers took over the management of ‘their’ factories. This development was as much fraught with danger for the future as the unorganised agrarian revolution going on for the same reason at the same time. The inactivity of the Mensheviks as leaders of the workers during the first stage of the revolution was largely responsible for the ruin of Russian industry, and for the diversion of working-class energy to a field where it could do more harm than good. Direct action by the workers could drive the employers out of their business, but it could not secure the successful management of mining, transport and industry by isolated groups of workers.
There is no doubt that Lenin was completely justified in calling the Social Revolutionaries a ‘petit-bourgeois’ party; the facts are not less in his favour as far as his similar judgement about the Mensheviks, particularly their official leaders, is concerned—yet they were an avowed Socialist party, accepting the same theoretical principles as the Bolsheviks. But Socialist slogans were in Russia accepted by practically all revolutionary movements, whereas in Western Europe they are confined to the labour movement. The readiness of the Mensheviks to leave the essence of political power to the Cadets or to a problematical figure like Kerensky, only proves that they were actually a radical democratic party which would have developed on similar lines as German Social Democracy after 1918, had the situation permitted such a course.
III: Bolsheviks
The rise of the Bolsheviks in the short space of eight months from an insignificant minority to the mass movement of the Russian workers is a memorable case of the success which a correct policy may have in decisive situations.
Already their clear slogans about war and peace were incomparably more effective than all the long-winded declarations of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. The coalition parties combined the illusion of a ‘peace without annexations and indemnities’ with the passive support of Kerensky’s war policy; the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, advocated fraternisation in the trenches and immediate termination of the war.
From February until July, and then again in September, Lenin fought for the formula ‘All Power to the Soviets’. The conscious political formulation of this demand long before its significance was fully realised by the people, and its recommendation up to the moment when it became the only hope of the revolution, was a great theoretical, and an even greater practical, achievement of the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership. The subordination of all other tasks to the aim of winning political power enabled Lenin to solve all social and economic problems of the revolution in a very simple and generally convincing manner, although it was frequently too late to act according to his ideas when the Bolsheviks actually succeeded in grasping power.
In the fierce struggle between capital and labour the Bolsheviks clearly championed the cause of the workers. In the fight for the eight-hour day, in the question of limiting profits, in the struggle for legal prevention of lockouts and for workers’ control in industry, the Bolsheviks were either the energetic leaders or the reliable advocates of the working class. But their ideas about the fundamental problems of the revolution led them to even more important demands. From the beginning of the revolution Lenin did not tire of predicting the approaching economic collapse. Many people shared his views, but only the Bolsheviks were prepared to draw all the necessary conclusions from them. While acknowledging the technical damage sustained by the economic system during the war, Lenin recognised the acute social struggle during the revolution as the ultimate reason for the impending collapse:
The capitalists are deliberately and consciously sabotaging (damaging, stopping, wrecking, hampering) production, hoping that a terrible catastrophe may mean the collapse of the republic and democracy, of the Soviets and the proletarian and peasants’ union, thus facilitating the return of a monarchy and the restoration of the full power of the bourgeoisie and landowners. [5]
The Mensheviks were intimidated by the tremendous economic difficulties and the political blackmail of Big Business, and tried to buy its goodwill by restraining the workers from ‘recklessness’; Lenin demanded energetic counter-measures, and particularly the nationalisation of the banks and control over the rich by the poor.
The July Days were not only the most important watershed of the revolution, but also a turning-point in Lenin’s theoretical and political attitude. He felt convinced that the revolution could be saved only by the forcible taking of power by the Bolsheviks, and designed a detailed economic programme for the new government. His proposals are based on the important assumption that even after a successful Bolshevik revolution a publicly controlled and politically emasculated capitalist system should continue to exist. This idea reflects the ‘bourgeois’ character of the Russian revolution in the brain of its greatest representative. The dictatorship of the proletariat was to be only the beginning of a long period of transition. The growth of the productive forces should continue under the economic leadership of capitalism until the transition to Socialism would at last become possible.
The Bolshevik attitude towards the agrarian problem was particularly important. Already at the Bolshevik April Conference proposals to the peasants were formulated whose interest is hardly diminished by the fact that they have only historical importance:
The party is decidedly in favour of immediate passing of all lands into the hands of the peasantry... The party counsels the peasants to take the land in an organised manner by no means allowing the slightest damage to property, and taking care to increase production...
The party must support the initiative of those peasant committees who, in a number of localities in Russia, give over the landowners’ property and agricultural implements in the hands of the peasantry organised into those committees for the purpose of cultivating all the land under social control and regulation. The party of the proletariat must counsel the proletarians and semi-proletarians of the village to strive to form out of every landowner’s estate a sufficiently large model farm which would be managed at public expense... [6]
The ‘model instruction’ of the peasants for their delegates to the first Peasant Soviet Congress in June 1917 was heartily welcomed by Lenin as a sound basis for collaboration between workers and peasants. He did not nourish any illusions about the ‘Socialist’ character of the Russian peasantry; he did not, on the other hand, believe that this difference of opinion between workers and peasants need prevent the support of the Bolsheviks by the peasants and vice versa :
The peasants want to retain their small holdings, to keep them within certain norms, periodically to equalise them... Let them! No intelligent Socialist would quarrel with them on this point. [7]
These words were written on 6 September 1917. At that time nobody was strong enough to oppose the unfolding peasant movement. The Bolsheviks had to bow before the storm which shook the power of their enemies and brought themselves to the helm of the state. The terrific problems of the times to come were hidden behind the urgent tasks of the hour. Their victory did not solve once and for all the manifold problems of Russia’s social and economic development, but nevertheless it was the beginning of a new historical epoch.
Notes
1. M Jacobsen, Die russischen Gewerkschaften (Berlin, 1932), p 13.
2. L Trotsky, A History of the Russian Revolution , Volume 3 (London, 1933), p 9.
3. L Trotsky, A History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 2 (London, 1933), p 348
4. V Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution (Newhaven, 1936), p 237.
5. N Lenin, Complete Works , Volume 21, Book 1 (London, 1929), p 179.
6. Cited in N Lenin, Complete Works , Volume 20, Book 2 (London, 1929), pp 400ff.
7. N Lenin, Complete Works , Volume 21, Book 1, p 133.