rise. But when the revolutionary wave had actually
knocked their door they came out opposing it. They
denigrated it as a “strike fever.” When the hundreds
of thousands of workers were marching in a
revolutionary action they were busy to divert the
workers into a “petition campaign.” But they failed
miserably.
From the beginning, Lenin was struggling hard
to build a Proletarian Party by uniting all the proletarian
forces on the basis of Marxism, revolutionary strategy
and tactics and principles of democratic centralism.
At times, he agreed to practical adjustments and
compromises even with his adversaries and acted to
honour the feelings and sentiments of working people
for a single and united party. But he never diluted his
struggle against the various manifestations of
opportunism and fake claims of upholding Marxism.
He never sacrificed his basic ideological and political
positions. In all situations, he guided the Bolsheviks
in practice along a revolutionary path and gave an
overriding importance to the interests of revolution.
By 1912, the struggle for the Proletarian Party had
reached a point of culmination, a point of settling the
accounts with the Menshevik liquidators, Otzovists and
the so called August Bloc of Trotskytes. The Sixth All
Russia Conference of RSDLP held in 1912 had
expelled them from the Party and declared the
emergence of a Bolshevik Party- the RSDLP(B). This
political and organisational polarisation and
consolidation had thrown up a much needed political
leadership in the political horizon of Russia and it
determined the future course of Russian revolution.
The Outbreak of Imperialist War
On July 14, 1914, the German imperialists had
declared war on Russia. Thus the First World War
had begun. This was a part of a predatory war between
the two groups of imperialist powers who were out to
divide the world among themselves through war for
plunder and oppression. The tsarist govt. had joined
a group of imperialist powers called “Entente”
because of its annexationist ambitions and with a view
to use the war to crush the revolution in Russia. The
tsarist govt. raised the slogan of “defend fatherland”
and sought to move the people into the war.
The war had seriously interrupted the advance
of revolution. How to view the war and advance the
revolution stood as the most crucial and urgent
questions before the revolutionaries in Russia.
The Mensheviks and other petty bourgeois parties
chose to echo the tsarist slogan. They preached to
abandon the struggle and preserve the “social peace.”
But Lenin and the Bolsheviks upheld the revolutionary
internationalism. Lenin declared that it was a
predatory and imperialist war and disastrous for the
proletariat in the imperialist Countries locked in the
November - 2017
war. Therefore, he called upon the proletariat to
oppose the war and convert it into a civil war to
overthrow the ruling classes of their own Countries
and also in Russia, the tsarist autocracy. Lenin tried
hard to rally the parties of the Second International
around this line, but most of the parties were deep in
the mire of opportunism and they sided with their ruling
classes in the war waving the banner of defend the
fatherland. The Russian opportunists- the Mensheviks
and Socialist revolutionaries- had readily joined this
bandwagon.
The Bolsheviks had boldly championed their policy
towards the war and revolution. They called the
workers to boycott the War Industry Committees and
extensively propagated against the war and for peace
and prepared the workers, peasants and the soldiers
for a revolutionary overthrow of tsarist autocracy.
Millions died because of war and epidemics
caused by the war. Drafting of 14 million able-bodied
men into the army had created worst shortage of
labour. While the population and the soldiers went
hungry, barefoot and naked, the bourgeois and the
landlords made big fortunes out of the war. While the
tsarist army was suffering one defeat after the other,
the bourgeois was engineering a palace coup to
replace the Nicholas-II with his brother Michael
Romanov to climb the seat of power, continue the war
and prevent the revolution. Thus the tsardom was in
a serious crisis.
February Revolution: Fall of Tsardom
During Jan and February, 1917, the workers in
Russia came into the streets in waves of strikes. They
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