April Theses, April Days

About April 14 – April 1, 1917: Somewhere in Finland. A group of Bolsheviks travels to Finland to greet Lenin as he approaches Petrograd. Lenin chided one of them, the right-leaning Kamenev, for positions he had taken in Pravda on cooperation with the Provisional Government and in favor of the defensist war policy.

April 16 – April 3, 1917: At the Finland Station. Lenin arrives in Petrograd at the Finland Station and is given a bouquet that Trotsky says must have made him feel very awkward. He was greeted by Cheidze, the Menshevik president of the Petrograd Soviet.

Cheidze felt he had to caution Lenin about cooperation with the Provisional Government and its defensist policies. Ignoring this, Lenin concluded his brief set of remarks saying, “Long live the world socialist revolution!”

Lenin and his entourage, including Zinoviev the agitator, drove to Bolshevik headquarters in armored cars. They stopped from time to time so Lenin could deliver essentially the same brief speech to crowds along the way.

At headquarters, the expropriated mansion of a court ballerina, Lenin impatiently endured numerous speeches of welcome. At length he addressed the party. For two hours he spoke against the defensist, collaborationist, and right opportunist policies the Petrograd Bolsheviks had let themselves be drawn into. He must also have explained what he thought was the correct line, for as we’ll see he read out the “April Theses” the next day.

Nobody seems to have taken notes. The speech left its hearers dumbfounded, wondering whether he really meant what he’d said.

The All Russia Conference of Soviets was just ending that day.

April 17 – April 4, 1917: The April Theses. Twice, once at a meeting of the Bolsheviks and again at a meeting to which the Mensheviks were also invited, Lenin reads his ten “April Theses.” He said later that week, prefacing the version published in Pravda:

I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3, and therefore at the meeting on April 4, I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation.

The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself—and for honest opponents—was to prepare the theses in writing. I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tseretelli. I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The first thesis addresses the policy of the revolution to the war, “…[N]ot the slightest concession to ‘revolutionary defensism’ is permissible.” This includes the “error” of fighting only to defend the homeland, with no thought of annexations or indemnities, as the bourgeois Provisional Government would have it publicly – in spite of their private alignments with capitalist interests at home and abroad.

The next four theses address the phenomenon of dual government – power being shared between the soviets and Provisional Government with the soviets as the junior partner – under the heading Fraternization. Lenin sees the dual government as a transitional phase between the bourgeois February Revolution and the proletarian revolution that was yet to come. But the party, a small minority even in the soviets, should not therefore with join the Mensheviks and social democrats in support of the Provisional Government. The party’s goal should be to transfer “the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies,” not ”to return to a parliamentary republic.”

The sixth and seventh theses call for nationalization of all lands under the soviets and consolidation of all banks in a single state bank under the Soviet. Yet in the eighth thesis, Lenin does not advocate immediate transfer of ownership of the means of production to the workers, but rather only the strengthening of the workers’ soviets.

The ninth and tenth theses set forth the political tasks of the Bolshevik party, to include the convocation of a new revolutionary International, one that would specifically exclude social democrats of the stripe who favored collaboration with the Provisional Government.

Visit this page to find the entire text of the Pravda article and all ten theses.

April 20 – April 7, 1917: Pravda publishes “April Theses.” See the link in the entry for April 17 – April 4, 1917.

April 21 – April 8, 1917: Pravda’s Critique. The editors split with Lenin on the “immediate transformation of [the Russian] revolution in to a socialist revolution." In fact, right Bolsheviks continued to struggle against Lenin’s program of action down to the beginning of the October Revolution.

April 29 – April 16, 1917: Trotsky Released. Trotsky is released from British detention in Canada at the request of the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, Miliukov, who was himself being pressured by the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky took ship for Russia.

April 30 – April 17, 1917: War Invalids Demonstrate. The Cadets, the bourgeois party of Foreign Minister Miliukov, organize a pro-war demonstration of veterans invalided by the war.

Meantime, in provincial elections, democratically elected dumas are chosen. As the soviets retained local control, Trotsky notes, these bodies were nullities.

May 1 – April 18, 1917: International Socialist May Day. Russian socialists celebrate International Socialist May Day according to the new style calendar, that is, when other socialists around the world are celebrating it – though it happens to be April 18 on the old style calendar. It became a national holiday; not only factories but also government offices shut down.

The holiday atmosphere spread to the front at staff headquarters in Moghilev, where even the tsarist generals marched. Elsewhere Russian troops celebrated with Austro-German POWs, singing the same revolutionary songs in different languages.

This was also the day Foreign Minister Miliukov chose to send a note reaffirming Russia’s loyalty to her allies and her pledge not to make a separate peace. This part was generally agreeable to the defensists in the Soviet. But the subtext endorsed the annexations and indemnities his British and French counterparts expected as part of the peace agreement. Naturally one of the annexations Miliukov was contemplating was that of the Dardanelles, at the expense of Germany’s ally Turkey. This raid had been planned for, but the soldiers eventually refused to carry the plan out.

May 2 – April 19, 1917: The Executive Committee Meets. Miliukov’s note is the topic at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. The meeting ran late without producing any consensus or plan of action.

May 3 – April 20, 1917: The April Days. The text of Miluvov’s note hits the Petrograd papers, sparking three days of demonstrations: the “April Days.”

The Finland Regiment marched to the seat of the Provisional Government at the head of over 30,000 armed soldiers. Workers left their factories and joined them. The banners read, “Down with Miliukov!” “Down with Guchov,” Minister of War in the Provisional Government, too.

The demonstrators lacked a specific program; nor was the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, hastily reconvened, able to supply one. In reaction, General Kornilov, not for the last time, offers troops for suppressing the demonstrations; bourgeois agitators denounce Lenin as a German agent.

May 4 – April 21, 1917: The Dual Government Meets. As the workers and soldiers regather in the streets, ministers of the Provisional Government meet with the Executive Committee of the Soviet. Neither side of the dual government knew what to do about the demonstrations. Prince Lvov, President of the Council of Ministers, thought maybe the Provisional Government should withdraw. Chernov, Minister of Agriculture, said it might be sufficient for Miliukov to exchange the Foreign Ministry for the portfolio of the Minister of Public Education. Miliukov refused both that suggestion and the suggestion that he write a new note. Some members of the Soviet would apparently have been satisfied with a better explanation of the first one.

Meanwhile the demonstrations, which had been announced by Bolshevik workers from Vyborg, continued. The demonstrators ignored the plea of the President of the Petrograd Soviet, Cheidze, to disperse. Counterdemonstrators, organized by the Cadet Party, clashed with the workers. General Kornilov made good his threat to mobilize cavalry and artillery against the workers. Some officers tried to seize one of their banners. Gunfire was exchanged.

But the Soviet ordered the revolutionary regiments to stay in their barracks, and Kornilov’s to return there. The soldiers obeyed the Soviet’s orders; thereafter none of the troops would march unless the orders were counter-signed by the Soviet.

For its part, the Executive Committee would be satisfied with a verbal explanation of Miliukov’s note; he was not compelled to resign. Having come so close to civil war in the capital (and the situation was much the same in Moscow), the Soviet ordered demonstrations to stop for two days. The Bolshevik Central Committee subsequently agreed to the halt.

May 5 – April 22, 1917: Izvestia’s Interpretation. Izvestia, the official organ of the Petrograd Soviet, thinks it necessary to declare that the Soviet had not interfered with the “legally constituted” authority of the Provisional Government by its actions during the April Days. Since the demonstrators were calling for more rather than less interference, the Soviet thus remained less revolutionary-minded than the people themselves.

Nor could a Bolshevik motion for a vote of no confidence in the government come within hundreds of votes of passage. The Petrograd Soviet also politely ignored a resolution of the Helsinki Soviet, backed by revolutionary sailors, offering to help remove the Provisional Government.

May 7 – April 24, 1917: Bolshevik Party Conference. The All-Russia Bolshevik Party Conference called for in the April Theses begins. Neither Stalin nor Kamenev were named to the five-member praesidium.

Lenin spoke against misdirected violence, violence that is not being used as a tactic to further some specific revolutionary strategy. He also presented a resolution “On the Attitude Towards the Provisional Government” that had been adopted by the Petrograd conference of the party. The resolution recognized the government as an organ of the bourgeoisie and landowners, enumerating the programs such as land reform and the eight-hour workday it had failed to act upon or actively resisted. The resolution was published in Pravda on May 10 – April 27.

July 18 – July 5, 1917: Lenin Slandered

The Soviet hears the slander against Lenin but nobody, except relative newcomers to revolutionary work, believes it. Tseretilli and Cheidze, leaders of the Central Executive Committee and the Menshevik party, rejected the story out of hand, and asked the papers not to print it. But a publication known for yellow journalism did. The Minister of Justice, one of the socialist ministers in the Coalition Government, resigned on this account.

The slander had its origins in the circumstance that Lenin passed through Germany when he travelled to Petrograd in April. A former police spy and prisoner of war, one Ermolenko, made up the rest: Lenin had contacts with the German General Staff and was acting as their agent; German money was propping up the Bolshevik party with a view to destabilizing the dual government.

A discredited journalist and operative of the Intelligence Service, one Alexinsky, became the spokesman for the slander. He had passed Ermolenko’s fabricated report to the papers. The Menshevik Dan had already denounced him in Izvestia. Now Zinoviev demanded that the Central Executive conduct an immediate investigation with a view to exonerating Lenin and neutralizing the slander, but this gained little traction.

Trotsky records that Lenin then asked him, “Aren’t they getting ready to shoot us all?” So Lenin went back into hiding, at first in a Petrograd worker’s apartment. Zinoviev and others went underground too.

July 17 – July 4, 1917: At the Tauride Palace Again

As on the evening before, revolutionary workers and soldiers again stood before the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace. This time, their demands having already been presented, they demanded an answer. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviets had been in joint session since about 6:00 p.m. Someone brought Chernov, a Social Revolutionary on the committee and also Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government, outside to speak. At that moment the Kronstadt sailors arrived. Apparently the sailors did not like the tendency of Chernov’s speech; they detained him. So informed, the Central Executive sent Bolsheviks and Trotskyites, including Trotsky himself, to right the situation. Trotsky says he saw agents of the tsarist secret police by the doorway, trying to get in.

Chernov had been ordered into an automobile. Trotsky’s first impulse was to ride away with him in it. But Midshipman Raskolnikov, a leader of the Kronstadters, excitedly told him that would give the wrong impression. So Trotsky stood on the car and gave a short speech, asking for a show of hands by those opposed to releasing the minister. No-one raised his hand; Chernov returned to the palace without further hindrance.

General Polotsev was hoping more Cossacks would arrive. Instead the 176^th regiment came up from Krasnoe Selo, rain-soaked and bearing full battle kit. The Soviet assumed these were “loyal” troops; the Menshevik Dan asked their commander to post sentries at the entrances to the palace. In fact the 176^th had come to join their militant brethren in the demonstration. Consulted by an aide, Trotsky advised the regiment to comply with the request, a duty they were only too happy to perform. Trotsky notes that, if it had been a Bolshevik insurrection, they could easily have arrested the entire Central Executive then and there.

The Soviet invited the demonstrators to speak. They chose 90 representatives and five orators, representing 54 factories. The speakers began by denying the claim in the Soviet’s manifesto of the previous day that the demonstrations were counter-revolutionary; the banners they carried were anything but. Tseretilli answered that the program of peace, nationalization of industry and land, and power to the soviets lay could not then be carried out, at least not in “the present circumstances…in the Petrograd atmosphere.” He proposed adjourning the Soviet and reconvening it in Moscow two weeks hence.

The Putilov workers were next to impose themselves on the Central Executive. In a mass of 30,000, they demanded that Tseretilli be brought before them. This could easily have gone wrong; even the Bolsheviks did not want something untoward to happen. So they sent Zinoviev, the Bolshevik upon whom Lenin relied as an orator, instead. Zinoviev began, “In place of Tseretilli, it is I who have come out to you,” and was greeted by laughter. He gave a long speech and ended by appealing to the demonstrators to depart in peaceful and orderly fashion.

This the demonstrators prepared to do, but while Zinoviev had been speaking, armed Putilov workers broke into the palace. One of them took the podium and accused the Soviet of “making bargains with the bourgeoisie and landlords.” Cheidze, presiding over the meeting, had a rifle under his nose. But he calmly handed the worker a printed manifesto and asked him to read it. It said the workers ought to go home, otherwise they would be traitors to the revolution.

Be that as it may. The Bolshevik Central Committee circulated a resolution for ending the demonstration. So the demonstration, for the most part, broke up, and the streets around the Tauride Palace emptied. But the Central Executive remained in session.

July 16 – July 3, 1917: July Days: The Central Executive Committee

As the banners of the marchers in Nevsky Prospect approach the Tauride Palace, meetings of the two sections of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets are already in session.

The committee had had news of the Machine Gun regiment’s plans earlier in the day. Kamenev and the other Bolsheviks present offered to go to the regiment and ask for restraint. But the Central Executive preferred to issue a proclamation declaring demonstrations to be treachery to the revolution. Meanwhile Tseretilli gave the joint session his ideas for addressing the cabinet crisis brought on by the resignation of the Cadet ministers the day before.

Realizing a proclamation might not be enough to stop the what they were calling the “insurrection,” the Compromisers (i.e., Trotsky’s name for those in the Soviet who sought accommodation with the Provisional Government and by extension the bourgeoisie) cast about for the armed protection of troops. Not finding any of the garrison who were then willing to take their side, they sent to the Fifth Army, nearest Petrograd at the front. By evening, scarcely a hundred had been found by the Menshevik assigned this task. Trotsky remarks more than once on the irony of this effort: The Soviet answering the demonstrators’ demand that it seize the power, by recruiting troops to suppress the demonstrators rather than the Provisional Government.

The workers’ and soldiers’ section of the Central Executive had gone back into session. Recent elections had given the Bolsheviks a majority in that section, or so the right-socialists feared. Zinoviev was giving a speech against the Compromisers when the marchers reached the palace. In response, Kamenev proposed selecting a commission of 25 members to lead the demonstration; Trotsky seconded. Seeing the tendency of the debate that followed, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries walked out of the meeting. The Bolsheviks and Trotskyites who remained passed a resolution calling on the Central Executive to take power, and named fifteen members to the leadership committee, leaving ten places open in case the right-socialists should have second thoughts.

Meanwhile, Cheidze, Menshevik president of the Soviet, confronted the crowd outside the palace. When he faltered, Voitinsky took his place, but was also met with silence. Trotsky fared better when his turn came, but he stopped short of advocating insurrection (as his enemies were later to claim).

Events did not stop unfolding at midnight.

May 4 – April 21, 1917: The Dual Government Meets

As the workers and soldiers regather in the streets, ministers of the Provisional Government meet with the Executive Committee of the Soviet. Neither side of the dual government knew what to do about the demonstrations. Prince Lvov, President of the Council of Ministers, thought maybe the Provisional Government should withdraw. Chernov, Minister of Agriculture, said it might be sufficient for Miliukov to exchange the Foreign Ministry for the portfolio of the Minister of Public Education. Miliukov refused both that suggestion and the suggestion that he write a new note. Some members of the Soviet would apparently have been satisfied with a better explanation of the first one.

Meanwhile the demonstrations, which had been announced by Bolshevik workers from Vyborg, continued. The demonstrators ignored the plea of the President of the Petrograd Soviet, Cheidze, to disperse. Counterdemonstrators, organized by the Cadet Party, clashed with the workers. General Kornilov made good his threat to mobilize cavalry and artillery against the workers. Some officers tried to seize one of their banners. Gunfire was exchanged.

But the Soviet ordered the revolutionary regiments to stay in their barracks, and Kornilov’s to return there. The soldiers obeyed the Soviet’s orders; thereafter none of the troops would march unless the orders were counter-signed by the Soviet.

For its part, the Executive Committee would be satisfied with a verbal explanation of Miliukov’s note; he was not compelled to resign. Having come so close to civil war in the capital (and the situation was much the same in Moscow), the Soviet ordered demonstrations to stop for two days. The Bolshevik Central Committee subsequently agreed to the halt.

April 16 – April 3, 1917: At the Finland Station

Lenin arrives in Petrograd at the Finland Station and is given a bouquet that Trotsky says must have made him feel very awkward. He was greeted by Cheidze, the Menshevik president of the Petrograd Soviet.

Cheidze felt he had to caution Lenin about cooperation with the Provisional Government and its defensist policies. Ignoring this, Lenin concluded his brief set of remarks saying, “Long live the world socialist revolution!”

Lenin and his entourage, including Zinoviev the agitator, drove to Bolshevik headquarters in armored cars. They stopped from time to time so Lenin could deliver essentially the same brief speech to crowds along the way.

At headquarters, the expropriated mansion of a court ballerina, Lenin impatiently endured numerous speeches of welcome. At length he addressed the party. For two hours he spoke against the defensist, collaborationist, and right opportunist policies the Petrograd Bolsheviks had let themselves be drawn into. He must also have explained what he thought was the correct line, for as we’ll see he read out the “April Theses” the next day.

Nobody seems to have taken notes. The speech left its hearers dumbfounded, wondering whether he really meant what he’d said.

The All Russia Conference of Soviets was just ending that day.