ABSTRACT
Lenin had always combined an analytical Marxist outlook with a strong streak of romantic utopianism. After the February Revolution the utopianism gradually became dominant. A great many statements such as those quoted can be found throughout Lenin's writings. The point is that Lenin remained true to the fundamental thesis of Russian Marxism, even as late as the initial phase of the 1917 revolution. Lenin went on to explain again and again that in Russia the revolution was bound to be one of a bourgeois-democratic, not of a socialist, nature. Lenin pointed out that the ultimate victory of the revolution would require a temporary dictatorship; but, he added, it will be of course not a socialist but a democratic dictatorship. While Lenin continued to reject "utopian nonsense", he often defined the political tasks of our "bourgeois revolution" in such a manner that it automatically became an anti-bourgeois revolution, i.e., a proletarian, socialist revolution.
