All parties supported their government in the First World War. But the Bolsheviks did not support. In 1915, Lenin spoke with a programmatic article “Transforming the imperialist war into a civil war.”
Here it is, the slogan, let’s think about it: TRANSFORM THE IMPERIALIST WAR INTO A CIVIL WAR. The word has been spoken.
The Bolsheviks uttered slogans of the inevitability, desirability, and usefulness of the Civil War many times, quite frankly.
“NO SUPPORT FOR THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT!”
The first words of Lenin, who entered his native land on April 3, were: “Won’t they arrest me in Petrograd?” Lenin came as a spy, with the money of his enemies and to undermine his state. But the Bolsheviks who met Lenin assured his own father: no, there was no danger.
The Petrograd Soviet even arranged a solemn meeting for Lenin at the Finlyandsky Station; on his behalf, the Chairman of the Executive Committee, Chkheidze, made a fiery speech, calling on Lenin to join “revolutionary democracy” and talking about his services to the revolution.
During his speech, Lenin was frankly bored, and then addressed the assembled crowd. Lenin concluded it with the slogan:
Long live the world socialist revolution!
Another legend: that right there, on the square, the text of the future article “On the tasks of the proletariat in this revolution” was read. This article was written after the speech at the station, the next day. It went down in history as the April Theses.
The meaning of the article is very simple - Lenin declared war on four fronts at once:
To the leadership of one's own party;
The leadership of the Soviets, especially the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries;
Provisional Government;
To all governments around the world (a World Revolution was being prepared).
“THERE IS SUCH A PARTY!”
On June 3, 1917, the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies opened in Petrograd. The main topic of discussion revolves around the idea of coalition, unification, and support for the Provisional Government. Everyone wants to unite.
In his speech, the Menshevik Tsereteli says: “In Russia there is not a single political party that would say: give power into our hands, we will take your place.”
To this, Lenin shouted from his seat, according to one version: “There is such a party!” According to another version, it’s even shorter: simply “Yes!”
Having received the floor, he explained in more detail: “I answer: yes. Our party is ready every minute to take power entirely. Trust us and we will give you our program.”
And do not unite with anyone, do not share power with anyone.
REPARTION REQUIREMENT
In May, at the First All-Russian Congress of Peasant Councils, Lenin declared: “We want now, without losing a single month, not a single week, not a single day, the peasants to receive landowners’ lands.”
But it is quite obvious that no one will give up their legal property for a good living. This means that it can only be “taken” in the form of a Civil War.
In September 1917, Lenin demanded to move “to the factories, to the barracks” with a program of radical reforms. And right there: we must “without wasting a minute, organize the headquarters of the rebel detachments, distribute forces, move loyal regiments to the most important points, surround Alexandrinka (where the Pre-Parliament meets), occupy Petropavlovka, arrest the General Staff and the government, mobilize armed workers... call them to a desperate last battle, immediately occupy the telephone and telegraph.”
Lenin boldly promoted violence and the crudest methods of quick solutions. He was not afraid of chaos or the danger of massacre. The Bolsheviks had long considered civil war inevitable. They were preparing it as the “inevitable future” of their country and the whole world.
Regarding the events of October 25 in Petrograd, Trotsky wrote: “The bourgeois classes were waiting for barricades, flames of fires, robberies, streams of blood. In fact, there was a silence more terrible than all the noise in the world. The social soil moved silently, like a revolving stage, carrying yesterday’s masters into the underworld.”
POLITICAL “SPEAKS”
From September 14 to 25, 1917, this All-Russian Democratic Conference took place in the building of the Alexandria Theater. Delegates: 134 Bolsheviks, 305 Mensheviks, 592 Socialist Revolutionaries, 55 People's Socialists, 17 non-party members and 4 Cadets.
The Democratic Conference declares itself the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, or Pre-Parliament. The new head of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Leon Trotsky, declared on behalf of the party: “We have nothing in common with the government of popular treason and with this Council of counter-revolutionary connivance.”
Resolution of the Bolshevik Central Committee: the creation of such a government is “a signal for civil war.”
Excuse me... Whose signal exactly?!
In September 1917, Tsereteli believed: “The transfer of all power to the Soviets would inevitably lead to an immediate civil war with all its horrors.”
“And we want civil war!” - Trotsky answered him.
After the October coup, the Bolsheviks created their own one-party government. (Left Social Revolutionaries and anarchists would be introduced into it a little later and very briefly.) Then the workers, in whose name the Bolsheviks swore, spoke out against the one-party government. The All-Russian Executive Committee of Railway Workers (Vikzhel) threatened a strike. Vikzhel in its resolution stated that it did not want civil war. Vikzhel is the leading professional association in Russia: the most united, numerous (up to 500,000 members), active, decisive. During the Great War, the importance of Vikzhel was determined by the extremely important role of railways.
A delegation of Putilov workers came to inter-party negotiations on November 30, 1917. The delegation stated: we will not allow a civil war! We don't need bloodshed between revolutionary parties.
The Putilovites made evasive promises, but did not change anything.
Lenin negotiated with Vikzhel for three weeks. Vikzhel did not yield, and Lenin dispersed Vikzhel.
At the Constituent Assembly on January 4, 1918, N. Bukharin said no less definitely: “The question of power will be finally resolved by that very civil war, which cannot be stopped until the complete victory of Russian workers, soldiers and peasants. With our irreconcilable class enemies, we vow from this rostrum to wage civil war, not reconciliation.”
WORLD CIVIL WAR
Another slogan: peace to the peoples! Sounds nice. But how can we combine the words from the official “Address to the peoples and governments of the allied countries” with the idea of peace: “We promise full support to the working class of each country, which will rise up against its national imperialists, against the chauvinists. Against the militarists, - under the banner of peace, brotherhood of peoples and socialist reconstruction of society."
There was a war going on. This “Appeal” is an actual call for treason against the Fatherland and violation of the Oath. To “transform the imperialist war into a civil war” - already on the territory of other countries.
The Bolsheviks believed that there should be “self-determination not of peoples and nations, but of the proletariat in each nationality” - “individual demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but a part of the general democratic (now: general socialist) world movement. It is possible that in individual specific cases a particle contradicts the general, then it must be rejected.”
The slogan of the World Revolution meant: Civil war must break out not only in Russia, but throughout the world.
Related information.
Old photographs confirm that the spring rejoicing of the people over the overthrow of tsarism gave way to bitter disappointment. In the fall, under the slogans: “Down with the capitalist ministers,” the Bolshevization of the soviets took place.
L. Trotsky, having become chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, turned the Executive Committee of the Soviet into a headquarters for preparing a coup d'etat.
No, today Russia is not threatened by bread riots. Again we reaped a good harvest. And there are no problems with food in the country.
But social differentiation today is manifested in the fact that wealthy Russians, being able to overpay for services and food, eat and live normally, but millions of Russians who receive 7 thousand rubles for their work, as well as pensioners, are already simply malnourished and sometimes go hungry .
The most powerful socio-political irritant is how the public property is preserved and distributed - the treasury.
Every year, the Accounts Chamber names huge amounts of illegal spending of budget funds.
Every year, people learn about how appointees of the head of state participate in cuts and kickbacks of budget funds that are allocated from the treasury. Some of them are prosecuted, but the stolen goods, as a rule, remain untouched.
In every region, Russians know how officials live, but those who are obliged to check whether they legally own the property that they have do not see this?
Russians see what cars these same “inspectors” drive to work, what apartments and houses they live in, where and how they relax. But the clause has not been applied to officials or their “inspectors” for the sixth year now. 8 paragraph 2 art. 235 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which allows the deprivation of property of someone who owns it unlawfully. And every year there is so much talk about the fight against corruption.
Today there are no political forces that would firmly promise to find a way out of this situation. The existing Bolshevik Party is losing the trust of the people. And how could it be otherwise if deputies from this party in the State Duma voted for laws that provide them with a salary that exceeds the average salary in the country by 20-30 times, and pensions of Russians by 40-50 times?
V. Putin, the guarantor of the Russian Constitution, is also losing trust. Only 45,602,075 out of 110,000,000 eligible voters voted for him in the last election.
Something tells me that if he takes the post of guarantor of the Constitution for the fourth time, he won’t get that much.
I am sure that the 15,000,000 working pensioners who were deprived of pension indexation in 2018 will not vote for such a guarantor of the Constitution.
Millions of graduates of educational institutions who have not found work in their specialty, knowing that deputies and ministers have assigned pensions to themselves at 75% of their salary of 800,000 rubles, and their grandparents, who have 40-50 years of work experience, have been assigned pensions of 7-10 thousand rubles, they are unlikely to want to vote for such a guarantor of the Constitution.
During all the years of his rule, V. Putin never moderated the autocracy of his appointees with the requirements of the Basic Law and did not provide judicial protection for Russians from illegal and unreasonable actions, inactions and decisions of government bodies and officials.
A hundred years ago, out of despair, people decided to support the Bolsheviks, seeing in them a more decisive political force capable of establishing order in the country.
Today there is no force capable of establishing the power of the Constitution and justice in the country, which can ensure the meaning, content and application of laws, the activities of the legislative and executive powers.
The main problem is that those exercising state power today do not understand this. Therefore, those who do not even promise to establish the rule of the Basic Law in the country are striving for power. They want to establish their own autocracy and the people will again be in the hands of new adventurers.
“The transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan, indicated by the experience of the Commune, outlined by the Basel (1912) resolution and arising from all the conditions of the imperialist war between highly developed bourgeois countries. No matter how great the difficulties of such a transformation may seem at one moment or another , socialists will never give up systematic, persistent, steady preparatory work in this direction, once war has become a fact" (Lenin, article "War and Russian Social Democracy", September 1914)
Here we need to stop and pay attention to a very important feature of Lenin’s plan. Ilyich had no intention of saving Russians from the horrors of war; he only wanted to redirect the cannons and machine guns so that the war would go against part of his own people. But it was easier to achieve this transformation of the war “wrong” into “right” - so that brother against brother and son against father - when “one’s” government was defeated. This defeat weakened him and made the path to revolution easier. And Lenin points out: “A revolution during war is a civil war, and the transformation of a war of governments into a civil war, on the one hand, is facilitated by the military failures (defeat) of governments, and on the other hand, it is impossible to actually strive for such a transformation without facilitating those defeat itself... The revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot help but desire the defeat of its government..." (article "On the defeat of its government in the imperialist war"). In principle, Lenin proclaimed the slogan of defeat not only the tsarist government, but also all other governments participating in the First World War. However, he cared little whether the socialists of Germany, Austria-Hungary, England and France would support his call with their practical actions. In addition, only one of the warring parties can suffer defeat in a war. Therefore, the defeat of Russia in practice means a military victory for Germany and the strengthening of the Kaiser's government. But Lenin is in no way embarrassed by this circumstance and he insists that the initiative for defeatism should come precisely from the Russian Social Democrats: “... The last consideration is especially important for Russia, because this is the most backward country in which a socialist revolution is directly impossible That is why the Russian Social Democrats had to be the first to come up with the theory and practice of the slogan of defeat" (Lenin, "On the defeat of their government in the imperialist war").
Admire the following quotes from the leader of the world proletariat, every letter and punctuation mark in them is saturated with complete Russophobia: “Down with priestly sentimental and stupid sighs for peace at all costs! Let us raise the banner of civil war...” (Lenin, “Situation and Tasks” socialist international"). “The slogan of peace, in my opinion, is wrong at the moment. It is a philistine, priestly slogan. The proletarian slogan should be: civil war...” (Lenin, “Letter to Shlyapnikov 10.17.14”) “For us, Russians, from the point of view interests of the working masses and the working class of Russia, there cannot be the slightest, absolutely no doubt that the least evil would be now and immediately - the defeat of tsarism in this war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than Kaiserism..." (Lenin, "Letter to Shlyapnikov. 10/17/14".) Stunning statements of cynicism! And it’s not just “losing the war”, but turning it into a civil war - this is already a double betrayal! Lenin demands, furiously insists on the need for civil war! It is a pity that the tsarist government did not think of sending a messenger to Europe with an ice ax for Mr. Ulyanov, who wrote his Russophobic libels in European coffee houses. Look, the fate of Russia in the twentieth century would have been much less tragic.
And another very important point: we look at the dates of Lenin’s statements. The leader of Bolshevism put forward the tasks of the defeat of Russia and the need for a civil war immediately and unambiguously, when no one yet knew the upcoming course of the war. N. Bukharin, who was with him in Switzerland, said in the Moscow Izvestia in 1934 that the very first propaganda slogan that Lenin wanted to put forward was a slogan to the soldiers of all the warring armies: “Shoot your officers!” But something confused Ilyich and he preferred the less specific formula “transforming the imperialist war into a civil war.” There had not yet been any serious problems at the front: no heavy losses, no shortage of weapons and ammunition, no retreat, and the Bolsheviks, according to Lenin’s plan, had already launched a fierce struggle to reduce the country’s defense capability. They created illegal party organizations at the front, conducting anti-war propaganda; issued anti-government leaflets and appeals; carried out strikes and demonstrations in the rear; organized and supported any mass protests that weakened the front. That is, they acted like a classic “5th column”.
Anti-war rally in a military unit 
A.A. Brusilov writes in his memoirs: “When I was commander-in-chief of the Southwestern Front during the German war, the Bolsheviks, both before and after the February coup, strongly agitated in the ranks of the army. During the time of Kerensky, they had especially many attempts to penetrate the army... I remember one incident ... My chief of staff, General Sukhomlin, reported to me the following: several Bolsheviks arrived at the headquarters in my absence. They told him that they wanted to infiltrate the army for propaganda. Sukhomlin was obviously confused and allowed them to go. approved and ordered them to be returned back. Arriving in Kamenets-Podolsk, they came to me, and I told them that under no circumstances could I allow them into the army, since they wanted peace at all costs, and the Provisional Government wanted peace. demands war until there is a general peace together with all our allies. And then I expelled them from the borders under my control.”
Anton Ivanovich Denikin testifies: “Bolshevism spoke most definitely of all. As we know, he came to the army with a direct invitation - to refuse obedience to his superiors and stop the war, finding grateful soil in the spontaneous sense of self-preservation that gripped the mass of soldiers. Delegates sent from all fronts to the Petrograd Soviet with inquiries, requests, demands, threats, there they sometimes heard from the few representatives of the defencist bloc reproaches and requests to be patient, but they found complete sympathy in the Bolshevik faction of the Council, taking with them into the dirty and cold trenches the conviction that peace negotiations would not begin until all power passes to the Bolshevik soviets."
The tsarist regime had many shortcomings, but it was not at all “rotten,” as Soviet propaganda so hard tried to convince us. The Black and Baltic seas were controlled by the Russian fleet, industry sharply increased the production of ammunition and weapons. The front has stabilized in the western regions of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. Losses? In total, Russia irretrievably lost less than 1 million people in the First World War, compare with the gigantic multimillion-dollar losses in the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars. But where the autocracy has fallen very short is in countering people of different political colors who are conducting subversive anti-state activities, including the so-called liberals. February revolution 1917 became a strong blow to the country's defense capability. From the memoirs of the so-called “old Bolshevik” V.E. Vasiliev “And our spirit is young,” the active role of the Bolsheviks in organizing the February revolution is clearly visible: “Late in the evening, the Putilovite Grigory Samoded came to our company. He brought an appeal from the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks, in which , in particular, it said: “Remember, comrade soldiers, that only the fraternal alliance of the working class and the revolutionary army will bring liberation to the dying oppressed people and put an end to the fratricidal and senseless war. Down with the royal monarchy! Long live the fraternal alliance of the revolutionary army with the people!" We immediately went to all the Izmailovo barracks to raise soldiers. Samoded went with us to the 1st battalion. Already in the morning of February 25, rallies began in the barracks. Officers, among whom Colonel Verkhovtsev was in charge , captains Luchinin and Dzhavrov, tried to interrupt the speeches, but the soldiers refused to obey the officers and began to act together with the revolutionary companies. At rallies, the soldiers called for decisive action - arming the workers, dispersing and disarming the police, policemen... Izmailovsky and Petrogradsky regiments, leaving the barracks. , joined the worker columns. All the streets and alleys on the Peterhof highway were reliably guarded by armed workers and our companies. That evening, leaflets from the St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committee were passed from hand to hand, calling for decisive action: “Call everyone to fight. It’s better to die a glorious death fighting for the workers’ cause than to lay down your life for the profits of capital at the front or to wither away from hunger and backbreaking work... We stopped one of the cars. Let's go to the barracks. We shot the officers who offered desperate resistance."
Street fighting in Petrograd in February 1917 
We read further the curious memoirs of V.E. Vasilyev especially carefully: “On March 1, 1917, an event of enormous importance occurred. A joint meeting of the workers’ and soldiers’ sections of the Council, with the participation of the Bolsheviks, developed (this was a major victory for our party) order number 1 of the Petrograd Council, mandatory for all units of the garrison. I remember well this order, which in the post-February days blocked the path of reaction to counter-revolutionary elements to obtain weapons. The order ordered the troops to obey only the Petrograd Soviet and their regimental committees. Weapons were now to be at the disposal of the soldiers’ committees and were not to be issued to officers even on their own. requirement. The soldiers were granted civil rights, which they could use outside of service and formation. Order 1 (the soldiers understood perfectly well who was its initiator) raised the authority of the Bolsheviks even higher. In early March, under the St. Petersburg Party Committee, N was created. . I. Podvoisky, one of the most experienced organizers of military and combat work, the Military Commission is the core of the future “Voenka”. At the end of March, a meeting of the Bolsheviks of the garrison took place (97 representatives from 48 military units). It established, instead of the Military Commission, a permanent apparatus - the Military Organization - with the goal of "unifying all party forces of the garrison and mobilizing the masses of soldiers to fight under the banner of the Bolsheviks."
So who actually inspired the adoption of the infamous order No. 1 - again, these were the Bolsheviks! The situation in Petrograd was critical, huge crowds of armed soldiers rushed around the city, starting fierce battles with cadets and gendarmes; In Kronstadt, massacres of officers by sailors took place. Formal anarchy! In such a situation, it would have cost nothing to push any, even the most anti-Russian, resolution through the new authorities, just to calm the raging “defenders of the Fatherland.” And for some reason we still blame the so-called “liberals” for the collapse of the army. General A.S. Lukomsky noted that the order of the 1st Petrosovet “undermined discipline, depriving the officer command staff of power over the soldiers.” With the adoption of this order in the army, the principle of unity of command, fundamental to any army, was violated, as a result there was a sharp decline in discipline. All weapons came under the control of soldiers' committees. But this was to the advantage of the Bolsheviks, and during this period they became the most active defenders of the so-called “army democracy.” The order to the delegates to the Minsk Council, drawn up by the Bolshevik A.F. Myasnikov, said: “Considering it correct... the destruction of standing armies... we see the need to create more democratic orders in the army.” Among the new Bolshevik slogans is “arming the people.” It is interesting that when the Bolsheviks began to create their own - truly combat-ready Red Army - they completely forgot about order number 1 of the Petrograd Soviet, and about “army democracy”, and about “arming the people” too. In the army led by Trotsky, without any sentimentality they shot their soldiers even for minor offenses, achieving the strictest discipline. Thus, in August 1918, Trotsky used decimation to punish the 2nd Petrograd Regiment of the Red Army, which had left its combat positions without permission.
The memoirs of another “old Bolshevik” - F.P. Khaustov - date back to April and May 1917: “District Bolshevik committees are elected. This makes the regiment united... The committee establishes connections with neighboring regiments and the same work is also carried out there, according to elections of Bolshevik committees. The matter expanded, and in mid-March the entire 43rd Corps was organized on the Bolshevik program. The Bolshevik Committee of the 436th Novoladozhsky Regiment was almost entirely included in the corps committee, replenished with representatives from other regiments. At the same time, the Bolshevik committee of the 436th Novoladozhsky regiment established contact with the Central and St. Petersburg committees of the Bolsheviks through Comrade A. Vasiliev and received literature and leadership from there. At the same time, a live connection was established with the Kronstadt sailors, and the regiment committee became part of the Petrograd military organization. the central committee of the Bolshevik party. At the beginning of March, the committee organized, contrary to the order of the commander-in-chief of the Northern Front, fraternization with the Germans on an area of at least 40 miles. At this time I was the chairman of the Bolshevik corps committee. The fraternization took place in an organized manner.... The result of the fraternization was the actual cessation of hostilities in the corps sector."
So, the tsarist government was unable to keep the situation in the country under control. Instead of reliably isolating or eliminating the organizers of anti-state activities, law enforcement agencies exiled them to well-fed Siberia, where they gained strength, fed themselves, freely communicated with each other, making revolutionary plans. If necessary, revolutionaries easily escaped from exile. During the war, the fight against subversive activities was also insufficiently active and did not correspond to reality. After the attempted Kornilov rebellion, the Military Revolutionary Committees (MRC), under the control of the Bolsheviks, seized into their hands all command and administrative power in the regiments, divisions, corps and armies of the Western Front. The Provisional Government, like the tsarist government, was unable to promptly and firmly stop the subversive activities of the Leninists. For the sake of truth, let us once again recall that it itself did a lot to destabilize the army with ill-conceived resolutions and orders. But one should not attribute too much to the Kerensky government; despite serious mistakes, it had no intention of surrendering the country to the Germans. From January to September 1917, about 1.9 million people joined the active army from the rear garrisons, which significantly blocked the increasing flow of desertion. In the summer, Germany continued to maintain significant forces on the Eastern Front: 127 divisions. Although their number dropped to 80 in the fall, this was still a third of Germany's total ground forces. In June 1917, Kornilov's army with a decisive assault broke through the positions of the 3rd Austrian Army of Kirchbach west of the city of Stanislav. During the further offensive, about 10 thousand enemy soldiers and 150 officers were captured, and approximately 100 guns were captured. However, the subsequent breakthrough of the Germans on the front of the 11th Army, which fled before the Germans (despite its superiority in numbers) due to moral decay, neutralized the initial successes of the Russian troops. This is how supporters of Russia’s defeat stabbed their own country in the back.
Of course, the defeatist activities of the Russian revolutionaries were received with great enthusiasm by the Germans. The German General Staff organized a large-scale campaign to support the subversive efforts of the Bolsheviks. Special offices were engaged in agitation among Russian prisoners of war. German intelligence financed the Bolsheviks with large sums through the left-wing political adventurer Parvus (real name Gelfand). He settled in Stockholm, which became an outpost of German intelligence to control events in Russia. On March 2, 1917, the German representative office in Stockholm received the following instruction 7443 of the German Imperial Bank: “You are hereby notified that demands will be received from Finland for funds to promote peace in Russia. The demands will come from the following persons: Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sumenson, Kozlovsky, Kollontai, Sivers or Merkalin Current accounts are opened for these persons in branches of private German banks in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland in accordance with our order 2754. These requirements must be accompanied by one or two of the following signatures: “Dirschau”. "or "Milkenberg". Requests endorsed by one of the above-mentioned persons must be executed without delay." After the war, Erich von Ludendorff (Quartermaster General, the de facto head of the German General Staff) recalled: “... Our government, having sent Lenin to Russia, took on enormous responsibility! This trip was justified from a military point of view: it was necessary for Russia to fall ...". And one more thing: “By November, the degree of disintegration of the Russian army by the Bolsheviks had reached such a level that the OKH was seriously thinking about using a number of units from the Eastern Front to strengthen its positions in the West. At that time we had 80 divisions in the East - a third of all available forces.”
Erich von Ludendorff: "...Our government, having sent Lenin to Russia, took on enormous responsibility! This trip was justified from a military point of view: it was necessary for Russia to fall" 
After the October revolution, the first thing the Bolsheviks did was publish Lenin’s decree on peace. This treacherous step became the most powerful and decisive impetus for the complete collapse of the front, it practically ceased to exist. The soldiers went home in huge crowds. At the same time, a mass exodus of officers began from the army, who did not agree with the new conditions of service, with the new government and who reasonably feared for their lives. Murders and suicides of officers were not uncommon. The guards assigned to guard the warehouses fled, which is why a lot of property was stolen or perished in the open air. Due to the massive loss of horsepower, the artillery was completely paralyzed. In January 1918, 150 thousand people remained on the entire Western Front; for comparison, in mid-1916 it consisted of more than 5 million people.
General Brusilov testifies again: “I remember a case when in my presence it was reported to the Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front that one of the divisions, having expelled its superiors, wanted to go home entirely. I ordered to let them know that I would come to them the next morning to talk with them They tried to dissuade me from going to this division because it was extremely brutal and that I would hardly get out of them alive. I, however, ordered to announce that I would come to them and that they would meet me with a huge crowd of soldiers. raging and not aware of her actions. I drove into this crowd in a car... and, standing up, asked them what they wanted. They shouted: “We want to go home!” I can’t with the crowd, but let them choose several people with whom I will speak in their presence. With some difficulty, but still the representatives of this crazy crowd were chosen. When I asked which party they belonged to, they answered me that. They used to be social revolutionaries, but now they have become Bolsheviks. "What is your teaching?" - I asked. “Land and freedom!” they shouted... “But what do you want now?” They frankly declared that they no longer wanted to fight and wanted to go home in order to divide the land, taking it away from the landowners, and live freely, not bearing any burdens. To my question: “What will happen to Mother Russia then, if no one thinks about her, and each of you cares only about yourself?” To this they told me that it is not their business to discuss? , what will happen to the state, and that they firmly decided to live calmly and happily at home. “That is, to eat sunflower seeds and play the harmonica?!” “Exactly like that!” the nearest rows burst out laughing. “I also met my 17th Infantry Division, which was once in my 14th Corps, which greeted me enthusiastically. But in response to my exhortations to go against the enemy, they answered me that they themselves would have gone, but other troops adjacent to them, they will leave and will not fight, and therefore they do not agree to die uselessly. And all the units that I saw, to a greater or lesser extent, declared the same thing: “they don’t want to fight,” and everyone considered themselves Bolsheviks.. "
Lenin, in his speech at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies on June 9 (22), 1917, said: “When they say that we are striving for a separate peace, this is not true... We do not recognize any separate peace with the German capitalists and We won’t enter into any negotiations with them.” It sounded patriotic, but Ilyich blatantly lied and resorted to any tricks to come to power. Already at the end of 1917. The Bolsheviks entered into negotiations with Germany, and in March 1918. they signed a separate peace on fantastically enslaving terms. Under its terms, a territory of 780 thousand square meters was torn away from the country. km. with a population of 56 million people (a third of the total population); Russia pledged to recognize the independence of Ukraine (UNR); indemnity in gold (about 90 tons) was transported by the Bolsheviks to Germany, etc. Now the Leninists had a free hand for the long-awaited war with their own people. By 1921, Russia was literally in ruins. It was under the Bolsheviks that the territories of Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Western Ukraine and Belarus, the Kara region (in Armenia), Bessarabia, etc. seceded from the former Russian Empire. During the Civil War, from hunger, disease, terror and battles, from 8 to 13 million people died (according to various sources). Up to 2 million people emigrated from the country. In 1921, there were many millions of street children in Russia. Industrial production fell to 20% of 1913 levels.
It was a real national disaster.
The Russian Social Democratic Party was founded in March 1898 in Minsk. Only nine delegates were present at the 1st Congress. After the congress, the RSDLP Manifesto was released, in which the participants expressed the idea of the need for revolutionary changes, and the issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat was included in the party program. The charter establishing the organizational structure of the party was adopted during the 2nd Congress, which was held in Brussels and London in 1903. At the same time, the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
The leaders of the groups were V.I. Lenin and Martov. The contradictions between the groups were as follows. The Bolsheviks sought to include in the party program the demand for the dictatorship of the proletariat and demands on the agrarian question. And Martov’s supporters proposed excluding from it the requirement for the rights of nations to self-determination and did not approve of each of the party members working on a permanent basis in one of its organizations. As a result, the Bolshevik program was adopted. It included demands such as the overthrow of the autocracy, the proclamation of a democratic republic, provisions for improving the lives of workers, etc.
In the elections to the governing bodies, Lenin's supporters received the majority of seats, and they began to be called Bolsheviks. However, the Mensheviks did not give up hope of seizing the leadership, which they managed to do after Plekhanov went over to the Menshevik side. During 1905-1907 members of the RSDLP took an active part in the revolution. However, later the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks differed in their assessments of the events of those years.
In the spring of 1917, during the April conference, the Bolshevik Party broke away from the RSDLP. The Bolshevik leader at the same time put forward a series of theses known as the April Theses. Lenin sharply criticized the ongoing war, put forward demands for the elimination of the army and police, and also spoke of the need for radical agrarian reform.
By the fall of 1917, the situation in the country had worsened. Russia stood on the brink beyond which there was chaos. The Bolsheviks' rise to power was due to many reasons. First of all, this is the obvious weakness of the monarchy, its inability to control the situation in the country. In addition, the reason was the decline in authority and indecisiveness of the Provisional Government, the inability of other political parties (Cadets, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc.) to unite and become an obstacle to the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik revolution was supported by the intelligentsia. The situation in the country was also affected by the First World War.
The Bolsheviks skillfully took advantage of the situation that had developed by the fall of 1917. Using utopian slogans (“Factories for the workers!”, “Land for the peasants!”, etc.), they attracted the broad masses of the people to the side of the Bolshevik party. Although there were disagreements within the leadership of the Central Committee, preparations for the uprising did not stop. During November 6-7, Red Guard troops captured strategically important centers of the capital. On November 7, the Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies began. The decrees “On Peace”, “On Land”, “On Power” were adopted. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee was elected, which until the summer of 1918 included the Left Social Revolutionaries. On November 8, the Winter Palace was taken.
The most important demand of the socialist parties was the convening of the Constituent Assembly. And the Bolsheviks agreed to this, since it was quite difficult to maintain power relying only on the Soviets. Elections took place at the end of 1917. More than 90% of the deputies were representatives of socialist parties. Even then, Lenin warned them that if they opposed Soviet power, the Constituent Assembly would doom itself to political death. The Constituent Assembly opened on January 5, 1918 in the Tauride Palace. But the speech of its chairman, Socialist Revolutionary Chernov, was perceived by Lenin’s supporters as a desire for open confrontation. Although the party debate had begun, the commander of the guard, sailor Zheleznyak, demanded that the deputies leave the hall because “the guard was tired.” The very next day, the Council of People's Commissars adopted theses on the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. It is worth noting that the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks was not accepted by most of society. Four days later, on January 10, the 3rd Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies began at the Tauride Palace.
After the seizure of power, the Bolshevik policy was aimed at satisfying the demands of the workers and peasants who supported them, since the new government needed their further support. Decrees were issued “On an eight-hour working day in industrial production”, “On the abolition of classes, civil, court military ranks”, etc.
During the 20s. A one-party system was fully formed. All monarchist and liberal parties, as well as the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, were liquidated.
The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia was the armed overthrow of the Provisional Government and the coming to power of the Bolshevik Party, which proclaimed the establishment of Soviet power, the beginning of the elimination of capitalism and the transition to socialism. The slowness and inconsistency of the actions of the Provisional Government after the February bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1917 in resolving labor, agrarian, and national issues, the continued participation of Russia in the First World War led to a deepening of the national crisis and created the preconditions for the strengthening of far-left parties in the center and nationalist parties in the outskirts countries. The Bolsheviks acted most energetically, proclaiming a course towards a socialist revolution in Russia, which they considered the beginning of the world revolution. They put forward popular slogans: “Peace to the peoples,” “Land to the peasants,” “Factories to the workers.”
In the USSR, the official version of the October Revolution was the version of “two revolutions”. According to this version, the bourgeois-democratic revolution began in February 1917 and was completely completed in the coming months, and the October Revolution was the second, socialist revolution.
The second version was put forward by Leon Trotsky. While already abroad, he wrote a book about the unified revolution of 1917, in which he defended the concept that the October Revolution and the decrees adopted by the Bolsheviks in the first months after coming to power were only the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the implementation of what the insurgent people fought for in February.
The Bolsheviks put forward a version of the spontaneous growth of the “revolutionary situation.” The very concept of a “revolutionary situation” and its main features was first scientifically defined and introduced into Russian historiography by Vladimir Lenin. He named the following three objective factors as its main features: the crisis of the “tops,” the crisis of the “bottoms,” and the extraordinary activity of the masses.
The situation that arose after the formation of the Provisional Government was characterized by Lenin as “dual power”, and by Trotsky as “dual anarchy”: the socialists in the Soviets could rule, but did not want to, the “progressive bloc” in the government wanted to rule, but could not, finding themselves forced to rely on Petrograd a council with which it disagreed on all issues of domestic and foreign policy.
Some domestic and foreign researchers adhere to the version of “German financing” of the October Revolution. It lies in the fact that the German government, interested in Russia’s exit from the war, purposefully organized the move from Switzerland to Russia of representatives of the radical faction of the RSDLP led by Lenin in the so-called “sealed carriage” and financed the activities of the Bolsheviks aimed at undermining the combat effectiveness of the Russian army and disorganization of the defense industry and transport.
To lead the armed uprising, a Politburo was created, which included Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Andrei Bubnov, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev (the latter two denied the need for an uprising). The direct leadership of the uprising was carried out by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which also included the Left Social Revolutionaries.
Chronicle of the events of the October Revolution
On the afternoon of October 24 (November 6), the cadets tried to open bridges across the Neva in order to cut off the working areas from the center. The Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) sent detachments of the Red Guard and soldiers to the bridges, who took almost all the bridges under guard. By evening, soldiers of the Kexholm Regiment occupied the Central Telegraph, a detachment of sailors took possession of the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, and soldiers of the Izmailovsky Regiment took control of the Baltic Station. Revolutionary units blocked the Pavlovsk, Nikolaev, Vladimir, and Konstantinovsky cadet schools.
On the evening of October 24, Lenin arrived in Smolny and directly took charge of the leadership of the armed struggle.
At 1:25 a.m. on the nights of October 24 to 25 (November 6 to 7), the Red Guards of the Vyborg region, soldiers of the Kexholm regiment and revolutionary sailors occupied the Main Post Office.
At 2 a.m. the first company of the 6th reserve engineer battalion captured the Nikolaevsky (now Moskovsky) station. At the same time, a detachment of the Red Guard occupied the Central Power Plant.
On October 25 (November 7) at about 6 o'clock in the morning, sailors of the Guards naval crew took possession of the State Bank.
At 7 a.m., soldiers of the Kexholm Regiment occupied the Central Telephone Station. At 8 o'clock. Red Guards of the Moscow and Narva regions captured the Warsaw station.
At 2:35 p.m. An emergency meeting of the Petrograd Soviet opened. The Council heard a message that the Provisional Government had been overthrown and state power had passed into the hands of the body of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
On the afternoon of October 25 (November 7), revolutionary forces occupied the Mariinsky Palace, where the Pre-Parliament was located, and dissolved it; sailors occupied the Military Port and the Main Admiralty, where the Naval Headquarters was arrested.
By 18:00 the revolutionary detachments began to move towards the Winter Palace.
On October 25 (November 7) at 21:45, following a signal from the Peter and Paul Fortress, a gun shot rang out from the cruiser Aurora, and the assault on the Winter Palace began.
At 2 a.m. on October 26 (November 8), armed workers, soldiers of the Petrograd garrison and sailors of the Baltic Fleet, led by Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, occupied the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government.
On October 25 (November 7), following the victory of the uprising in Petrograd, which was almost bloodless, armed struggle began in Moscow. In Moscow, the revolutionary forces met extremely fierce resistance, and stubborn battles took place on the streets of the city. At the cost of great sacrifices (about 1,000 people were killed during the uprising), Soviet power was established in Moscow on November 2 (15).
On the evening of October 25 (November 7), 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies opened. The congress heard and adopted the appeal “To Workers, Soldiers and Peasants” written by Lenin, which announced the transfer of power to the Second Congress of Soviets, and locally to the Councils of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants’ Deputies.
On October 26 (November 8), 1917, the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land were adopted. The congress formed the first Soviet government - the Council of People's Commissars, consisting of: Chairman Lenin; People's Commissars: for foreign affairs Leon Trotsky, for nationalities Joseph Stalin and others. Lev Kamenev was elected Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and after his resignation Yakov Sverdlov.
The Bolsheviks established control over the main industrial centers of Russia. The leaders of the Cadet Party were arrested, and the opposition press was banned. In January 1918, the Constituent Assembly was dispersed, and by March of the same year, Soviet power was established over a large territory of Russia. All banks and enterprises were nationalized, and a separate truce was concluded with Germany. In July 1918, the first Soviet Constitution was adopted.
