ABSTRACT
In October 1917 several streams of revolutionary activism-peasant, worker, soldier, nationalist-converged, and it was Lenin’s genius to seize the unique opportunity to knot them together in a single revolutionary moment. It must be stressed, however, that the Bolshevik revolution was directed as much against the moderate ‘evolutionary’ socialists as it was against the decaying authority of the ‘bourgeois’ Provisional Government. The revolution, moreover, appeared to run counter to Marx’s own views on the necessary developmental foundations for socialism-a mature economy and an advanced society. For Lenin-as for so many other revolutionaries in the twentieth century-the revolution appeared to be the key to development, and not vice versa. Once in power the revolutionary knot began to unravel, with open dissension within the party over various issues throughout the Civil War. It was only in March 1921 that the Leninist discipline, which had been so much discussed earlier, was finally imposed in practice. The aims of the other revolutionary threads also diverged, while ‘democracy’ as an aspiration, not only for the defenders of the Constituent Assembly but also for revolutionary workers and sailors in Kronstadt, did not disappear. Lenin’s second stroke of genius, then, was not only to have made a revolution but to have forged a ‘Leninist’ party-state out of a fissiparous revolutionary socialist movement.
