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Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power? and Ten Days that Shook the World
N. Lenin, Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?, 122 pp, Sutton Publishing, 1997, £2.99 (pb); John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World; The Illustrated edition, xiv + 273pp, Sutton Publishing, 1997, £19.99 (hb)
These two works have acquired historical status and are essential reading for all students of Russia's October 1917 Revolution. Lenin's Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power? was written first as an article on the eve of the revolution for which he confidently argues. John Reed's Ten Days provides a vivid and pulsating day-to-day account of that major event
Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power? was written shortly after Lenin had completed his better known State and Revolution. Unlike the latter, however, in which the Party barely features, the Bolshevik Party's claim to revolutionary leadership here constitutes the core of its argument. It is directed primarily at Bazarov and the group of left-wing socialists around Maxim Gorky's paper Novaya Zhizn', described by Lenin as 'quarter-Bolsheviks'. They shared Lenin's opposition to Russia's imperialist war, but criticised the Bolsheviks' preparations in the autumn of 1917 for organising an armed insurrection and seizing state power.
Discussing the widespread view that the Bolsheviks would never dare 'to take the whole governmental power into their hands alone', Lenin writes that the Bolsheviks would be unworthy of calling themselves a party if they refused to do so when the opportunity presented itself. He argues that they now have sufficient support to lead the workers to 'destroy all that is oppressive in the old state machine' and substitute their own new apparatus in the form of the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants.
Lenin compares the 240,000 Bolshevik Party members of that time acting in the interests of the poor with the 130,000 landowners oppressing 150 million Russians. Expecting that the quarter of a million Party members would be backed by a million adults votes (they were actually to receive nine million, or 24%, in the elections to the Constituent Assembly), he concludes that they already had a 'state apparatus' of a million people 'faithful to the idea of the socialist state'. This, he avers, could be enlarged further by 10-20 million people drawn into administering the country.
A few weeks later Lenin started disproving in practice the prediction that the Bolsheviks would be unable to take and hold on to state power. However, the years ahead were to show that he had greatly minimised the problems involved in so doing. Thus more than four years after taking power, he was to indicate that no more than a few thousand workers throughout Russia had been engaged in governing the country. And, looking back in 1923 he was to note that 'our state apparatus is to a considerable extent a revival of the past and has undergone hardly any change'.
This new edition is a facsimile of the booklet published in this country in 1922 by the Labour Publishing Company.
John Reed was an American left-wing socialist, and later communist, and a journalist of great talent, who was in Petrograd at the time of the October Revolution. His Ten Days captures the excitement and high hopes of working people in that city, which he shared, during those world-shaking days.
Reed moved around the city, spoke to people of opposing views, attended often heated and chaotic popular assemblies and congresses, and made notes and wrote up what he heard and saw. In addition he worked hard to provide, both in the text and in the 56-page Appendix of his book, some of the essential documents of the revolution, including a number from its opponents. However, not having been privy to the closed debates in the Bolshevik Party leadership prior to the rising, he is not immune on occasion from using hearsay leading him into factual error. In particular, his account of Lenin and Trotsky being initially on their own in the Central Committee meeting of 23 October 1917 in voting to organise the insurrection is incorrect. The Central Committee minutes, published later, show that the vote was 10-2 for the rising with only Zinoviev and Kamenev voting against.
Reed's book is no substitute for a study of the archives essential for a critical evaluation of the debates and decisions of the Bolshevik leadership and for examining possible alternatives open to them. It is however a crucial complement to these, indicating popular moods with vital influence on the actions of Lenin and his comrades.
Ten Days conveys the spirit and activity of the workers and soldiers in Petrograd and Moscow, which made October into a popular revolution albeit with elements of a coup d'état — a term which Reed applies twice to the Bolshevik planned, organised and led armed uprising. However, he also insists that 'if the masses all over Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed. The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people'. These desires were dominated by the people's yearning for an end to the war, movingly captured in Reed's account of how the Congress of Soviets greeted the unanimous adoption of the Decree on Peace introduced by Lenin.
Reed's classic first appeared in 1919 and had a great impact in Russia and on Socialists and Communists throughout the world. In a foreword Lenin wrote: 'Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world ... It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. However already in the 1920s the book was subjected to some criticism by Stalin (whose name occurs in it only once) and in the mid-1930s it became an acute embarrassment to the Communist establishment. Trotsky and most of the other revolutionary leaders, apart from Lenin, prominently featured in the book were now being condemned in Moscow as agents of fascism.
Reed, who died in 1920, had left the copyright of his book to the Communist Party, which in 1937 refused permission for the News Chronicle to serialise it. J.R Campbell, in this period of High Stalinism, claimed in the Daily Worker of 11 April 1938 that, after the Moscow Trials, 'we would be failing in our duty if we allowed to be reprinted a book containing inaccuracies and legends'. It was not until 1962, following the 20th and 22nd CPSU congresses and its reappearance in the Soviet Union, that Lawrence and Wishart re-issued Ten Days in Britain.
The new edition is attractively produced and well-illustrated. It has a 6-page introduction by Harold Shukman outlining Reed's adventurous life. At nearly three times the price of the Penguin edition still available at £6.99, it is however regrettable that the publishers have not provided it with a name and subject index.
