that the provisional government was the great
antagonist already of the ‘republic’ of soviet
workers and poor peasants taking shape among
the grass roots of society. This view was rejected
by the Socialist Revolutionaries, by the Men-
sheviks and at first by many of the Bolsheviks as
well. But Lenin won the Bolsheviks over and
thereby became the principal architect of the
course that the revolution took in November.
Lenin’s first aim was to destroy the provisional
government. With agitation of ‘all land to the
peasants’ and ‘all power to the soviets’, he helped
the revolutionary process along. But Lenin was
not the actual cause of the increasing lawlessness;
he could only fan the already existing flames. The
economic situation was daily getting more out
of hand. Inflation was increasing by leaps and
bounds. The provisional government was entirely
ineffectual in halting the slide into chaos at home.
The one hope left for it was the army.
Kerensky appointed a new commander-in-
chief, General Kornilov, and ordered a fresh
offensive in Galicia. The army responded, made
some progress at first, but was then routed when,
in turn, facing an attack. Meanwhile, in July,
while the offensive was still in progress, fresh dis-
orders in Petrograd, supported by thousands of
sailors from Kronstadt, looked like the beginning
of the new revolution. Lenin, however, regarded
an uprising at this time as premature. The
Bolshevik leadership was divided in its response
and hesitated to give a lead to the masses. The
rising proved a total failure. The provisional gov-
ernment branded Lenin a German spy and
ordered his arrest. He was forced into hiding and
later fled to Finland. The prospect of an early
Bolshevik revolution now seemed remote. Yet,
despite the ruin of his hopes, Lenin’s diagnosis
that Russia was in the grip of a continuing revo-
lutionary ferment proved, in the end, to be
correct.
The turn of events in September aided the
Bolsheviks. General Kornilov was marching on
Petrograd with troops with the avowed intention
of destroying the Bolsheviks and dissension and
defeatism in the armies’ rear. Kerensky ordered
Kornilov to lay down his command. Kornilov
refused and proclaimed himself the saviour of the
nation. Kerensky now appealed for armed help
from all the people, including the Bolsheviks.
Kornilov’s march on Petrograd ended in fiasco,
but the Bolshevik militia, the Red Guards,
retained their arms. Lenin now set about the
overthrow of the provisional government. In the
Petrograd Soviet the Bolsheviks in September
1917 at last enjoyed a majority. Lenin returned
to Petrograd in October in disguise. He won over
the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party to
his view that the time was now ripe for an armed
insurrection. The task of organising the rising was
assigned by the Petrograd Soviet to a military rev-
olutionary committee. Trotsky was its leading
spirit. To this threat, Kerensky and the provisional
government reacted complacently and too late.
On the Bolshevik side there was not much con-
fidence either. Trotsky’s armed men were largely
untrained. Nevertheless, Trotsky organised them
to seize power on 25 October (Russian date),
7 November (Western date). Bolshevik strength,
feeble as it was, proved enough. Kerensky could
not find sufficient troops to defend his government.
With the seizure of the Winter Palace, where
the provisional government was in session, the
virtually bloodless revolution was over. The insur-
rection had been deliberately timed so that it
coincided with the assembly of the second All-
Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies. The Bolsheviks, who were in
the majority, dominated the proceedings. Until
the time when a constituent assembly was elected
and met, the Congress entrusted the executive to
a provisional workers’ and peasants’ government,
thus regularising the power won by Lenin and
his associates. But the hold of power by the
Bolsheviks was precarious. It might last a day, a
week or longer. They could be overwhelmed by
a few hundred troops or outside powers. Lenin’s
achievement was to solidify Bolshevik power until
it embraced the greater part of the former Russian
Empire.
Had this birth of communist power fulfilled
the ‘scientific’ forecasts of Karl Marx, as Lenin
believed? Was it a realisation of the inevitable his-
torical process of class conflict according to
Marxian theory? Lenin had to adapt Marx to fit
the fact that the revolution had first succeeded in