THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL WORLD LEADERS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time 7

Challenges of the Revolution of 1905
and World War I

With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905,
Lenin returned to Russia. By then, clear differences had
emerged between Lenin and Mensheviks (“minoritari-
ans”) within the RSDWP. The Mensheviks argued that
the bourgeois revolution must be led by the bourgeoisie,
or middle class, with whom the proletariat, or working
class, must ally itself in order to make the democratic rev-
olution. Lenin defiantly rejected this kind of alliance.
Hitherto he had spoken of the need for the proletariat to
win hegemony in the democratic revolution. Now he flatly
declared that the proletariat was the driving force of the
revolution and that its only reliable ally was the peasantry.
The bourgeoisie he branded as hopelessly counterrevolu-
tionary and too cowardly.
The 1905 revolution failed, and in 1907 Lenin was
forced again into exile. When World War I broke out,
socialist parties throughout Europe rallied behind their
governments, despite being obliged by the resolutions of
prewar congresses to resist or even overthrow their respec-
tive governments if they plunged their countries into an
imperialist war. Lenin denounced the prowar socialists,
arguing that the real enemy of the worker was not the
worker in the opposite trench but the capitalist at home.
By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never
end and that the prospect of revolution was receding.
But in March, the starving, freezing, war-weary workers
and soldiers of Petrograd—St. Petersburg until 1914—
succeeded in deposing the tsar. Lenin and his closest
lieutenants hastened home from Germany, as German
officials believed that their return would undermine the
Russian war effort.