The October Revolution: Workers Take Power Part 1

The Russian Revolution is a vast subject. An exhaustive analysis of it is beyond the scope of this writing. But below, some of the key points will be highlighted. The Russian Revolution took place in the background of World War I, a war between imperialist powers over control of territories and colonies. The war caused a split in the international socialist movement. Right up to the outbreak of the war, the parties of the Second International had vowed to fight against the war once it started. Socialist parties had pledged to oppose sending workers of the warring countries to kill each other and die for their respective bourgeoisies, the capitalist class. But when the war started, nearly all of these parties collapsed in the face of the war hysteria in their respective countries and ended up supporting the war. Only the Bolshevik party, one of the socialist parties in Russia, and a small party in Serbia took a strong position against the war. The five Bolshevik members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, were sent into exile in Serbia for their position. The Bolsheviks were forced to go completely underground, and faced a new period of isolation and persecution when the war started. Rather than capitulating to the war hysteria, the Bolsheviks called for “revolutionary defeatism.” Their position was that the workers of every belligerent country should call for the defeat of their own ruling class. They called for socialist agitators in the armies to encourage fraternization between the soldiers of warring sides to discuss their common interest in ending the war and stopping killing each other. Lenin also called for turning the imperialist war into a civil war; in other words to turn this imperialist war between nations into a war between classes and against the capitalists. These positions were considered quite bold, to put it mildly, even by other anti-war socialists, or internationalists as they were known. Lenin was considered to be the extreme of the extreme at the time. Over the following two and a half years, millions of soldiers and civilians died in the bloodiest and most destructive war in history up to that point. The Russian Empire suffered huge casualties. Its army was made up mainly of peasants, as was the population as a whole – nearly 90% peasants. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in single battles. Famines and epidemics spread. On Feb. 23, 1917 (on the old calendar still used in Russia), March 8 on the modern calendar, International Women’s Day, a strike of woman textile workers in Petrograd was called. Petrograd, later named Leningrad and today called St. Petersburg, was the capital and the center of industry. The strike spread like wildfire. The war years of death, disease and deprivation for the workers and peasants, while the czar, the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie lived in almost indescribable luxury, now brought forth an explosion of revolutionary anger that was unstoppable. It was a spontaneous uprising – no organization or party had planned or organized it. But it was strongly influenced by decades of revolutionary work and experiences, especially the experience of the working class in the 1905-06 revolution. Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/milestones-in-communist-history-the-october-revolution/