Lessons of October; Chapter 5

Author: Leon Trotsky
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Chapter V

The July Days; the Kornilov Episode; the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament

The decisions of the April Conference gave the party a correct principled orientation but they did not liquidate the disagreements among the party leaders. On the contrary, with the march of events, these disagreements assume more concrete forms, and reach their sharpest expression during the most decisive moment of the revolution— in the October days. The attempt to organize a demonstration on June 10 (on Lenin's initiative) was denounced as an adventure by the very same comrades who had been dissatisfied with the character of the April demonstration. The demonstration of June 10 did not take place because it was proscribed by the Congress of Soviets. But on June 18 the party avenged itself. The general demonstration at Petrograd, which the conciliators had rather imprudently initiated, took place almost wholly under Bolshevik slogans. Nevertheless, the government sought to have its own way. It lightmindedly ordered the idiotic offensive at the front. The moment was decisive. Lenin kept warning the party against imprudent steps. On June 21, he wrote in Pravda: "Comrades, a demonstrative act at this juncture would be inexpedient. We are now compelled to live through an entirely new stage in our revolution." But the July days impended—an important landmark on the road of revolution, as well as on the road of the internal party disagreements.

In the July movement, the decisive moment came with the spontaneous onslaught by the Petrograd masses. It is indubitable that in July Lenin was weighing in his mind questions like these:

Has the time come? Has the mood of the masses outgrown the soviet superstructure? Are we running the risk of becoming hypnotized by soviet legality, and of lagging behind the mood of the masses, and of being severed from them? It is very probable that isolated and purely military operations during the July days were initiated by comrades who honestly believed that they were not diverging from Lenin's estimate of the situation. Lenin afterwards said: "We did a great many foolish things in July." But the gist of the July days was that we made another, a new and much more extensive reconnoiter on a new and higher stage of the movement. We had to make a retreat, under onerous conditions. The party, to the extent that it was preparing for the insurrection and the seizure of power, considered—as did Lenin— that the July demonstration was only an episode in which we had to pay dearly for an exploration of our own strength and the enemy's, but which could not alter the main line of our activity. On the other hand, the comrades who were opposed to the policy aimed at the seizure of power were bound to see a pernicious adventure in the July episode. The mobilization of the right—wing elements in the party became increasingly intensive; their criticism became more outspoken. There was also a corresponding change in the tone of rebuttal. Lenin wrote: "All this whining, all these arguments to the effect that we 'should not have' participated (in the attempt to lend a 'peaceable and organized' character to the perfectly legitimate popular discontent and indignation!!), are either sheer apostasy, if coming from Bolsheviks, or the usual expression of the usual cowed and confused state of the petty bourgeoisie" [CW Vol.25, "Constitutional Illusions" (July 26, 1917), p.204]. The use of the word "apostasy" at such a time sheds a tragic light upon the disagreements. As the events unfolded, this ominous word appeared more and more often.

The opportunist attitude toward the question of power and the question of war determined, of course, a corresponding attitude toward the International. The rights made an attempt to draw the party into the Stockholm Conference of the social patriots. Lenin wrote on August 16: "The speech made by Comrade Kamenev on August 6 in the Central Executive Committee on the Stockholm Conference cannot but meet with reproof from al] Bolsheviks who are faithful to their Party and principles." And further on, in reference to certain statements alleging that a great revolutionary banner was being unfurled over Stockholm, Lenin said: "This is a meaningless declamation in the spirit of Chernov and Tseretelli. It is a blatant untruth. In actual fact, it is not the revolutionary banner that is beginning to wave over Stockholm, but the banner of deals, agreements, amnesty for the social imperialists, and negotiations among bankers for dividing up annexed territory" [CW Vol.25, "Kamenev's Speech in the Central Executive Committee on the Stockholm Conference" (August 16, 1917), pp.240—41].

The road to Stockholm was, in effect, the road to the Second international, just as taking part in the Pre-Parliament was the road to the bourgeois republic. Lenin was for the boycott of the Stockholm Conference, just as later he was for the boycott of the Pre-Parliament. In the very heat of the struggle he did not for a single moment forget the tasks of creating a new Communist International.

As early as April 10, Lenin came forward with a proposal to change the name of the party. All objections against the new name he characterized as follows: "It is an argument of routinism, an argument of inertia, an argument of stagnation.—. . It is time to cast off the soiled shirt and to put on clean linen" [CW, Vol.24, "Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution—a Draft Program for the Proletarian Party" (April 10,1917), p.88]. Nevertheless, the opposition of the party leaders was so strong that a whole year had to pass by—in the course of which all of Russia cast off the filthy garments of bourgeois domination—before the party could make up its mind to take a new name, returning to the tradition of Marx and Engels. This incident of renaming the party serves as a symbolic expression of Lenin's role throughout the whole of 1917: during the sharpest turning point in history, he was all the while waging an intense struggle within the party against the day that had passed in the name of the day to come. And the opposition, belonging to the day that had passed, marching under the banner of "tradition," became at times aggravated to the extreme.

Chapter V continued

Lessons of October