The upheavals in Russia during 1917 changed the
history of the world. Russia broke with the evolutionary
Western path of national development.
The birth of communist power was seen by Lenin,
its founder, as the means by which not only the
vast lands and peoples of Russia would be transformed,
but also the world. For seven decades
Lenin was revered by half the world as its spiritual
guide despite the bitter dissensions among communist
countries as to which was the rightful heir.
His vision of communism as a world force was
realised less than twenty-five years after his death.
One of the fascinations of history is that it
shows how a man, in many ways very ordinary,
with ordinary human weaknesses, making mistakes
and bewildering his contemporaries with the
inconsistencies of his actions, can exert enormous
influence on his own times and on the world
decades later. Napoleon and Hitler caused devastation.
Napoleon left some good behind him;
Hitler, nothing but destruction. Lenin’s reputation
today has suffered with the demise of the
Soviet Union. Once elevated by propaganda, he
is now stripped of myth, but the impact of his
ideas was enormous.
The success of Lenin’s revolution, and the
birth and growth of Soviet power, exercised great
appeal as well as revulsion. Lenin’s achievement
was that he gave concrete expression to the theories
of Karl Marx. The Russian Revolution
appeared as the beginning of the fulfilment of
Marx’s ‘scientific’ prophecy that capitalist society
was heading for its inevitable collapse and that the
‘proletariat’, the workers hitherto exploited,
would take over and expropriate the exploiters.
The poor shall inherit this world, not the next.
That was obviously an intoxicating message. Of
course, Marx had written his great works in the
mid-nineteenth century. Some ‘adjustments’ of
his predictions were necessary to square them
with the realities of the early twentieth century.
In Germany, where Marx’s teachings had the
largest political following, and where a powerful
Social Democratic Party emerged, the lot of the
working man was improving, not getting worse
as Marx had predicted. The collapse of capitalism
did not after all seem imminent. Some German
socialists asked whether the party should not concentrate
on securing practical benefits for the
workers and accept the political system meanwhile.
This became the policy of the majority of
the party. The British Labour movement was
clearly taking this direction too. In France the
doctrine of industrial and class strife leading to
revolution had limited appeal outside the towns.
Marx’s apocalyptic vision of capitalism in its last
throes bore little relevance to conditions in the
most industrialised countries. But Lenin was
not disconcerted. He sharply condemned all the
‘revisionists’ and compromises with the ‘exploiting’
bourgeois society. He found the answer to
the paradox much later in the book of an English
radical on the nature of imperialism. J. A. Hobson
believed that the drive for empire by the Euro-
pean states was caused by the need of advanced
Western countries to find new profitable markets
for investment. Lenin elaborated and went
further. Imperialism, he wrote, was the last stage
of capitalism. It postponed the fulfilment of
Marx’s prophecy. Because the Asiatic and African
labourer was cruelly exploited, employers could
afford to pay their European workers more. But
the extension of the capitalist world could only
postpone, not avert, its collapse. The proletariat
must steel itself for the ultimate takeover and not
compromise. The class struggle, as Marx taught,
was the driving force of historical evolution.
Anything that lessened the class struggle was
treachery against the proletariat.
Lenin’s views were so extreme, ran so much
counter to the world in which he lived, that the
majority of socialists ridiculed him when they were
not accusing him of seeking to divide the socialist
movement. Those who were not socialists did
not take him seriously. His following, even among
Russian socialists right up to the revolution of
November 1917, was only a minority one.
This fanatical believer in the victory of the proletariat
and castigator of bourgeois capitalist
society and its intelligentsia of professors, lawyers
and administrators had, himself, been born into
the strata of society he virulently condemned.
More important privileges had given him the
education and freedom indispensable to his early
success. The founder of communism indubitably
sprang from the Russian tsarist middle class, to
the embarrassment of some of his Soviet biographers.
His real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
He assumed the name of Lenin later to confuse
the tsarist police. He was born in 1870. His
mother was the daughter of a retired doctor who
had become a small landowner. His father exemplified
success and social mobility in nineteenthcentury
Russia: he had made his way from humble
origins to the post of provincial director of
schools, a position in the Russian civil service entitling
him to be addressed ‘Excellency’. Lenin was
not ‘of the people’.
Lenin was only sixteen when his father suddenly
died. A year later an unnatural tragedy
blighted family life. The eldest son of this eminently
respectable family, Alexander, a student in
St Petersburg, had become involved in a terrorist
conspiracy to assassinate the tsar. Apprehended,
he was tried and hanged. Lenin now began to
study and enquire into his brother’s beliefs and
actions, which were a naive and violent response
to autocracy in the tradition of Russian terrorism.
But in Russia there was not yet guilt by association.
The family was treated with consideration.
Lenin was accepted to study law in the University
at Kazan. However, he was soon involved in
student protests and was expelled. For three years
he read and studied and became engrossed in the
radical writings of his time.
It was during this period that he first discovered
in Karl Marx’s writings a revolutionary philosophy
and a goal which, according to Marx, was
a scientific certainty. He spent his life working out
the right policies and tactics for Marxists to follow
in order to realise the goals of the proletarian revolution.
Unlike many other socialists, his faith in
Marx’s prediction was absolute, akin to that following
a religious revelation. This faith and certainty
gave him strength, but Lenin saw no point
in martyrdom. His brother’s gesture had been
heroic but useless. The leader must preserve
himself and avoid danger. It was an aspect of
Lenin’s ice-cold rationality despite his attacks on
the intelligentsia – that he ignored taunts that he
sent others into danger while he himself enjoyed
domesticity and safety abroad in London, Geneva
and Zurich.
A remarkable feature of tsarist Russia at this
time is that despite police surveillance of political
suspects – and Lenin was undoubtedly a suspect
– no political opponent was condemned for his
thoughts, as later in communist countries, but
only for his deeds. Even then punishment by later
standards was frequently lenient. The death
penalty was limited to those involved in assassination,
political murders or plotting such
murders. If sentenced to dreaded fortress imprisonment
a man’s health could be broken. The
lesser sentence of exile to Siberia bears no relationship
to the labour camps of Stalin’s Russia.
The inhospitable climate was a hardship but there
was no maltreatment. Lenin, for instance, when
later on he was sentenced, was free to live in a
comfortable household and to study and read.
But before this he was allowed a second chance
and after three years of waiting and petitioning
was readmitted to Kazan University. He was thus
able to complete his university studies before
moving as a fully fledged lawyer to the capital, St
Petersburg. Here he plunged into political activities
and became a leading member of a small
group of socialists. Adopting the agitational techniques
of the Lithuanian Jewish socialist organisation,
the Bund, the St Petersburg socialists
determined to spread the message of Marxism by
involving themselves in trade union agitation on
behalf of workers. Lenin and his associates agitated
successfully among the textile workers. The
police stepped in. Eventually, Lenin was sentenced
to three years’ exile in Siberia. In 1900 he
was permitted to return to European Russia. He
had matured as a revolutionary. He believed he
could best promote the revolution by leaving
Russia, as so many socialist émigrés had done
before him, and to organise from safety in the
West. Perhaps the police authorities were happy
to get rid of him. In any event, Lenin in 1900
received the required permission to leave his
country. Except for a few months in Russia after
the outbreak of the revolution in 1905, Lenin
spent the years before his return to Russia in April
1917 mainly as an exile in Switzerland.
Abroad, he developed the organisation of his
revolutionary party based on his own uncompromising
ideology. In the process he quarrelled with
the majority of Russian and international socialists
and finally split the Russian Democratic Socialist
Party. His faction, which at the Second Party
Congress in Brussels and London in 1903 managed
to gain a majority, became known as the
‘majority’ or Bolsheviks, and the minority took the
name of Mensheviks, although soon the fortunes
were reversed and until 1917 the Mensheviks constituted
the majority of the party. It is easier to
define the Bolsheviks’ ideas than the Mensheviks’.
The Bolsheviks thought that leadership was established
by the power of Lenin’s personality and the
hardness and sharpness of his mind. Lenin imbued
the Bolsheviks with his own uncompromising revolutionary
outlook. There was to be no cooperation
with the ‘bourgeois’ parties, unless for tactical
reasons it were expedient to support them briefly
and then only as ‘the noose supports a hanged
man’. Lenin believed a broadly based mass party
run by the workers would go the way of the
Labour Party in Britain and weakly compromise.
Only a small elite could understand and mastermind
the seizure of power by the proletariat. The
party must be centralised and unified. Lenin therefore
sought to build up this party of dedicated revolutionaries
who would agitate among the masses
and take advantage of all opportunities, having but
one goal, the socialist revolution.
The Mensheviks were never as united as the
Bolsheviks nor were they led by one man of
commanding personality. In turn, they accused
Lenin of dictatorial behaviour. The Mensheviks
developed their own Marxist interpretations.
Accepting Marx’s stages of development, they
believed that Russia must pass through a bourgeois
capitalist stage before the time would be
ripe for the socialist revolution. And so when
Russia embarked on the constitutional experiment
after 1905, they were prepared to support
the constitutional Kadet party in the Duma.
Despite their Marxist authoritarian revolutionary
ideology, the leadership in practice softened the
line of policy. Lenin was never very consistent
about his tactics, but his driving passion for the
socialist revolution, his ruthless pursuit of this
one goal when others in the party wavered and
were distracted, gave him ultimate victory over
the Mensheviks, who endlessly debated and advocated
freedom of speech. What true revolutionary
cared for ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’? Lenin
contemptuously regarded rule by the majority as
a liberal bourgeois concept.
Within Russia itself the adherents of the supporters
of the Social Democratic Party had little
appreciation of why the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
were quarrelling in face of the common enemy of
autocracy. It was not among the rank and file, small
in Russia in any case, that their differences mattered.
The Bolsheviks had no more than 20,000
members as late as February 1917. In any case it
was neither Mensheviks nor Bolsheviks who won
the greatest popular support but the Socialist
Revolutionaries. Formed in 1901, they looked to
the peasants rather than to the urban workers.
Some carried on the tradition of terror; a special
group organised assassinations and thereby satisfied
the demand for immediate revolutionary
action. In the long run the revolution of the peasantry
would occur. Other Socialist Revolutionaries,
acting as a reforming party, would press for liberal
constitutional reforms and laws to protect the peasants.
These liberal reforms would pave the way to
socialism later. The Socialist Revolutionary terrorist
and party wings were never really coordinated.
The revolution of 1905 took the Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks by surprise. At the outset they
had only a small following among the workers,
the Bolsheviks probably only a few hundred.
Lenin did not affect its course. Nine years later,
the outbreak of the First World War appeared to
mark the end of international socialism as one
after the other the national socialist parties placed
their countries before the brotherhood of the
proletariat. Some socialists formed a pacifist wing;
with them Lenin had nothing in common. Only
a small band of revolutionaries gathered around
Lenin. He was briefly imprisoned as a Russian spy
in Austrian Poland at the outbreak of the war but
was released to rejoin the other socialist exiles in
Switzerland. The Social Democrat Party in Russia
had dwindled from its peak of some 150,000
members in 1907 to probably less than 50,000 in
1914 and only a small minority of them were
Bolsheviks. But Lenin’s supreme self-assurance
and confidence in Marx’s analysis enabled him to
survive disappointments and setbacks. For him
the conflict among the imperialists was the opportunity
the socialists had been waiting for. He
hoped for the defeat of Russia and the exhaustion
of the imperialists. Then he would turn the war
between nations into a civil war that would end
with the mass of peoples united in their aim of
overthrowing their rulers and establishing the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Lenin’s view of the war and of the role of
the socialists did not persuade even the left wing
of the socialists who met in conferences in
Switzerland at Zimmerwald in 1915 and Kienthal
in the following year. The majority wished to
bring the war to a compromise end, with international
friendship and no annexations, and so
espoused a pacifist stand. Lenin attracted only a
handful to his side, among them the brilliant and
fiery young Trotsky, who had inspired the
workers’ councils – the soviets – which had
sprung up during the 1905 revolution. Trotsky
believed in a ‘permanent revolution’. He forecast
that the bourgeois first stage would flow into
the socialist second stage. Lenin closely shared
Trotsky’s views, believing he would witness the
socialist revolution in his lifetime. When the revolution
did occur, however, in February 1917,
the events took him once more by surprise.
The overthrow of tsarism took place with startling
speed. For the army of 6.5 million men in the
field, 1916 had closed with hope for the future.
The Russian army, after suffering some 7 million
casualties, had nevertheless proved more than a
match for the Austrian army. Indeed, only the
great power of the German army had stood in the
way of total Habsburg disaster. The Germans
proved formidable foes, but they were now outnumbered
and the plans for a coordinated offensive
east, west and south on the Italian front held
out the promise that the central powers could be
overwhelmed in 1917. The severe problems of
weapons and munitions for the Russian army had
been largely overcome by a prodigious Russian
industrial effort during 1916. After the heavy
losses sustained in the third year of war, the rank
and file in the army viewed war with stoicism and
resignation rather than with the élan of the early
months. But it was not an army demoralised and
ready to abandon the front. The ‘home front’ was
the first to collapse.
The hardship suffered by the workers and
their families in the cities swollen in numbers
by the industrial demands of the war effort was,
in the winter of 1916–17, becoming insupportable.
The ineffectual government was being
blamed. The tsar had assumed personal responsibility
for leading the armies and spent most of his
time after the summer of 1915 at army headquarters.
He had left behind Empress Alexandra,
a narrow-minded, autocratic woman. The ‘ministers’
entrusted with government were little more
than phantoms. The infamous Rasputin, on the
other hand, was full of energy until murdered in
December 1916 – an event greeted with much
public rejoicing.
The rioting that spontaneously broke out in
Petrograd – formerly St Petersburg – early in
March (23 February by Russian dating) 1917 was
not due to the leadership of the socialist exiles.
Their organisation within the country had suffered
severely when early in the war the tsarist
government smashed the strike movement. Yet,
unrest in Petrograd and Moscow had been
growing. Only a proportion of the workers in war
industries had received wage rises to compensate
them for the rapid rises in the price of food and
other necessities. Other workers and the dependent
families of the soldiers at the front were
placed in an increasingly desperate position. The
peasants were withholding food from the towns
and were unwilling to accept paper money, which
bought less and less. The railway system was
becoming more inefficient as the war continued,
unable to move grain to the towns in anything
like sufficient quantities. Dissatisfaction turned on
the supposedly ‘German’ empress and the administration
and government which permitted such
gross mismanagement. The revolution in March
1917 succeeded because the garrison troops of
the swollen army were not loyal and would not
blindly follow the command of the tsar as they
had done in peacetime.
Quite fortuitously the Duma had begun one
of its sessions at the very time when this new
unrest began. Among the professional classes, the
gentry and the army generals, the Duma leaders
had gained respect, even confidence, as faith in
the tsar’s autocracy and management of the war
rapidly diminished. The feeling of country and
towns was still patriotic. Everyone was suffering –
gentry, workers, peasants and the professional
classes. The war against the invader should be
won. But at the same time an alleviation of the
hardships that the population was suffering, especially
food shortages, must be dealt with now,
without delay. There seemed no contradiction.
The Duma was the one institution that provided
continuity and embodied constitutional authority.
Under the pressure of striking workers and
increasing anarchy in Petrograd, the Duma attempted
to gain control over the situation. Its
leaders advised the tsar to abdicate. The tsar,
lacking all support, hesitated only a short while
before giving up his throne. His brother declined
the poisoned chalice when offered the crown.
Once the decisive break of the tsar’s abdication
had been achieved there could be no saving of the
dynasty. The Duma also gave up meeting, handing
over authority to a small group of men who
became the provisional government, composed of
mainly moderate liberals and presided over by a
benign figure of the old school, Prince Lvov. The
new government contained one Socialist Revolutionary,
Alexander Kerensky, whose cooperation,
however, was sincere and who set himself the goal
of revitalising the war effort by winning over the
Russian people with a programme of broad reform
and freedom.
From the start, the provisional government did
not enjoy undisputed authority. In Petrograd, as
in 1905, the Council of Soviets, of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies sprang up, claiming to speak on
behalf of the workers and soldiers throughout
Russia. They were not ready to rule but they
asserted the right to watch over the provisional
government and to act as they pleased in the interests
of ‘political freedom and popular government’.
The provisional government sought the
cooperation of the Petrograd Soviet and had to
agree to permit the garrison troops, who had
taken the side of the revolution, to remain in
Petrograd. Henceforth, this disaffected force was
under the control of the Petrograd Soviet, and
could not be moved. The provisional government
also agreed to the establishment of soldiers’ councils
throughout the army, and the Soviet published
their famous ‘Order number one’ decreeing
that they should be set up in every army unit
by election. But the Soviet, dominated by
Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, was
quite incapable of providing for the coherent government
of Russia and had no intention either of
replacing the provisional government or of seeking
an early end to the war other than through a
Russian victory. Two leading Bolsheviks at this
time, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin, were ready
to cooperate with the ‘bourgeois’ revolution.
The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
and the Soviets of Peasant Deputies were dominated
by the Socialist Revolutionaries and had no
thought of ruling the country. However, the provisional
government also found it increasingly difficult
to prevent the country sinking into anarchy.
Only the army at the war-fronts stood firm. At
home the provisional government spoke of agrarian
reform, order, freedom and victory. A new,
freely elected parliament would be called to
decide on Russia’s future and provide a government
based on the democratic wishes of the
people. But meanwhile the provisional government
lacked the power and the means to improve
the conditions of the people. In the worsening
situation in May 1917, the provisional government
insisted that rivalry with the Soviets must
cease and that socialist representatives of the
Soviets enter the ‘bourgeois’ government. The
Soviets agreed to share power in a coalition and
the fusion seemed to be consummated when
Alexander Kerensky, as war minister, became its
leading member.
These developments were anathema to Lenin.
With the assistance of the German high command,
who naturally wished to further the disintegration
of Russia, Lenin reached Petrograd in
April, having travelled from Switzerland by way
of Germany. Lenin had no scruples about accepting
the aid of the German class enemy. Soon, he
believed, revolution would engulf Germany too.
What mattered now was to win back the Russian
socialists to the correct revolutionary path, even
though he led the minority Bolsheviks. The
socialist revolution, Lenin believed, could be
thwarted by the collaboration of socialists and the
bourgeois government. With relentless energy,
overcoming what proved to be temporary failures,
he changed the revolutionary tide.
For Lenin the mass upheaval taking place in
Russia was more than a ‘bourgeois’ revolution.
He believed the revolutionary upsurge would pass
beyond the bourgeois to the socialist stage
without pause. In his ‘April theses’ Lenin argued
without delay. There seemed no contradiction.
The Duma was the one institution that provided
continuity and embodied constitutional authority.
Under the pressure of striking workers and
increasing anarchy in Petrograd, the Duma attempted
to gain control over the situation. Its
leaders advised the tsar to abdicate. The tsar,
lacking all support, hesitated only a short while
before giving up his throne. His brother declined
the poisoned chalice when offered the crown.
Once the decisive break of the tsar’s abdication
had been achieved there could be no saving of the
dynasty. The Duma also gave up meeting, handing
over authority to a small group of men who
became the provisional government, composed of
mainly moderate liberals and presided over by a
benign figure of the old school, Prince Lvov. The
new government contained one Socialist Revolutionary,
Alexander Kerensky, whose cooperation,
however, was sincere and who set himself the goal
of revitalising the war effort by winning over the
Russian people with a programme of broad reform
and freedom.
From the start, the provisional government did
not enjoy undisputed authority. In Petrograd, as
in 1905, the Council of Soviets, of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies sprang up, claiming to speak on
behalf of the workers and soldiers throughout
Russia. They were not ready to rule but they
asserted the right to watch over the provisional
government and to act as they pleased in the interests
of ‘political freedom and popular government’.
The provisional government sought the
cooperation of the Petrograd Soviet and had to
agree to permit the garrison troops, who had
taken the side of the revolution, to remain in
Petrograd. Henceforth, this disaffected force was
under the control of the Petrograd Soviet, and
could not be moved. The provisional government
also agreed to the establishment of soldiers’ councils
throughout the army, and the Soviet published
their famous ‘Order number one’ decreeing
that they should be set up in every army unit
by election. But the Soviet, dominated by
Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, was
quite incapable of providing for the coherent government
of Russia and had no intention either of
replacing the provisional government or of seeking
an early end to the war other than through a
Russian victory. Two leading Bolsheviks at this
time, Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin, were ready
to cooperate with the ‘bourgeois’ revolution.
The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
and the Soviets of Peasant Deputies were dominated
by the Socialist Revolutionaries and had no
thought of ruling the country. However, the provisional
government also found it increasingly difficult
to prevent the country sinking into anarchy.
Only the army at the war-fronts stood firm. At
home the provisional government spoke of agrarian
reform, order, freedom and victory. A new,
freely elected parliament would be called to
decide on Russia’s future and provide a government
based on the democratic wishes of the
people. But meanwhile the provisional government
lacked the power and the means to improve
the conditions of the people. In the worsening
situation in May 1917, the provisional government
insisted that rivalry with the Soviets must
cease and that socialist representatives of the
Soviets enter the ‘bourgeois’ government. The
Soviets agreed to share power in a coalition and
the fusion seemed to be consummated when
Alexander Kerensky, as war minister, became its
leading member.
These developments were anathema to Lenin.
With the assistance of the German high command,
who naturally wished to further the disintegration
of Russia, Lenin reached Petrograd in
April, having travelled from Switzerland by way
of Germany. Lenin had no scruples about accepting
the aid of the German class enemy. Soon, he
believed, revolution would engulf Germany too.
What mattered now was to win back the Russian
socialists to the correct revolutionary path, even
though he led the minority Bolsheviks. The
socialist revolution, Lenin believed, could be
thwarted by the collaboration of socialists and the
bourgeois government. With relentless energy,
overcoming what proved to be temporary failures,
he changed the revolutionary tide.
For Lenin the mass upheaval taking place in
Russia was more than a ‘bourgeois’ revolution.
He believed the revolutionary upsurge would pass
beyond the bourgeois to the socialist stage
without pause. In his ‘April theses’ Lenin argued
an overwhelmingly peasant country. But he
believed, thus squaring these facts with Marx’s
analysis, that the revolution in backward Russia
would not survive without the international
socialist revolution, without the proletarian revolution,
especially in neighbouring Germany.
Russia had but provided the spark. The advanced
industrialised West, with its large proletariat
would, so he thought, take over the leadership of
the world revolution. In fact, the Russian crisis
had its immediate cause in the war – not in a
general world crisis of capitalism, but in the
specific failing of Russian autocracy and of the
provisional government to provide for the successful
economic and military management of
the war. Tsarism first and Kerensky next were
destroyed by inflation, by lack of food in the
towns and by the general hardships inflicted on a
people without an end to war in sight or sustained
victories to show for their immense sacrifices.
The second All-Russian Congress of Soviets
had called for a just and democratic peace without
annexations and indemnities, and had also abolished
the landlords’ ownership of land. Bolshevik
propaganda in the army and the lawless state
of the countryside, where the peasants seized
the land, added to Russia’s state of anarchy. The
invading German armies, with their appeal to the
subject nationalities, Ukrainians, Georgians, Poles
and the Baltic peoples, threatened Russia with territorial
disintegration. Lenin’s insistence on peace
with the Germans at any price appeared suicidal
even to his closest collaborators. Fighting ceased
and armistice negotiations were formally completed
early in December 1917. Meanwhile,
Lenin in November had permitted elections for
the Constituent Assembly to be held. When it
met in January 1918 the Bolsheviks found they
had not obtained a majority. Out of a possible
520 deputies the Bolsheviks had only gained
161, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, with 267
deputies, held an absolute majority. Lenin
now turned his back on this ‘sovereign’ assembly
and the whole democratic process. The assembly
was adjourned and prevented from gathering
again.
Trotsky was sent to negotiate peace terms with
the Germans. At Brest-Litovsk he prevaricated
and made fine speeches. Lenin and the Bolshevik
leaders pinned their hopes on the coming
German revolution, spurred on by revolutionary
propaganda among the German troops. The
Germans lost patience with Trotsky’s intoxication
with his own intellectual brilliance and occupied
large regions of western Russia virtually without
resistance. Trotsky thereby almost destroyed the
revolution in its infancy. On 3 March 1918, the
Russians, on Lenin’s insistence, and overruling
Trotsky’s tactics, accepted the peace terms of
Brest-Litovsk which dispossessed Russia of a large
part of its former empire. Lenin had cajoled and
bullied his colleagues on the Central Committee
into accepting the harsh terms. Then he had to
fight again to achieve its ratification by the
Congress of the Bolshevik Party.
Peace with Germany gave Lenin and the Bolsheviks
a breathing space, and saved the Bolshevik
revolution. Lenin still confidently expected the
war among the Western nations to turn into the
great civil war and victory for the proletariat. But
meanwhile the revolutionary spark had to be kept
alive. It was now threatened by anarchy and by
civil war from the opponents of the Bolsheviks,
aided by Russia’s former allies, who hoped somehow
to bring it back into the war. In the succeeding
years of war and famine, the Russian people
were to suffer even more than they had suffered
during the course of the First World War itself.
But at the end of this period, the first communist
nation was firmly established in a world very
different from the one imagined by Lenin at the
time of revolution.
World History
