Most traditional accounts of the two Russian revolutions in 1917 written through the twentieth century by both anti-Soviet Russian and Western scholars present a Russia that in March successfully overthrew the tsar’s autocratic rule and replaced it with a liberal, Western-style democracy. Then in November a small group of hard-core radicals, led by Vladimir Lenin, somehow staged a second revolution and installed an atheistic Communist government. More recently, however, and especially since the Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a different picture is emerging. Scholars are recognizing that the second revolution had widespread popular support and that Lenin was often following events as much as leading them.

Born into the middle class, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) became an enemy of imperial Russia when his older brother was executed for plotting to kill the tsar in 1887. As a law student Lenin studied Marxist doctrines with religious ferocity. Exiled to Siberia for three years because of socialist agitation, Lenin lived in western Europe after his release for seventeen years and developed his own revolutionary interpretations of Marxist thought (see “The Birth of Socialism” in Chapter 24).

Three interrelated ideas were central for Lenin. First, he stressed that only violent revolution could destroy capitalism. Second, unlike the socialist members of the provisional government, Lenin believed that a socialist revolution was possible even in a country like Russia. According to classical Marxist theory, a society must have reached the capitalist, industrial stage of development before its urban workers, the proletariat, can rise up and overthrow the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie, and create a Communist society. Because Russia was only just ending the feudal stage of economic development and entering the industrial stage, socialists and Marxists fiercely disagreed as to whether Russia was ready for a Communist revolution. Lenin thought that although the industrial working class was small, the peasants, who made up the bulk of the army and navy, were also potential revolutionaries. Third, Lenin believed that at a given moment revolution was determined more by human leadership than by vast historical laws. He called for a highly disciplined workers’ party, strictly controlled by a dedicated elite of intellectuals and full-time revolutionaries like him. This “vanguard of the proletariat” would not stop until revolution brought it to power.

Lenin’s ideas did not go unchallenged by other Russian Marxists. At a Social Democratic Labor Party congress in London in 1903, Lenin demanded a small, disciplined, elitist party; his opponents wanted a more democratic party with mass membership. The Russian Marxists split into two rival factions. Because his side won one crucial vote at the congress, Lenin’s camp became known as Bolsheviks, or “majority group”; his opponents were Mensheviks, or “minority group.”

In March 1917 Lenin and nearly all the other leading Bolsheviks were living in exile abroad or in Russia’s remotest corners. From neutral Switzerland Lenin opposed the war as a product of imperialistic rivalries and saw it as an opportunity for socialist revolution. After the March Revolution, the German government provided safe passage for Lenin across Germany and back into Russia, hoping he would undermine Russia’s sagging war effort. They were not disappointed. Arriving in Petrograd on April 16, Lenin attacked at once, issuing his famous April Theses. To the Petrograd Bolsheviks’ great astonishment, he rejected all cooperation with what he called the “bourgeois” provisional government — he didn’t want “dual power.” He called for exactly what the popular masses themselves were demanding: “All power to the soviets!” and “Peace, Land, Bread!” Bolshevik support increased through the summer, culminating in mass demonstrations in Petrograd on July 16–20 (known as the July Days) by soldiers, sailors, and workers. Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee had not planned these demonstrations and were completely unprepared to support them. Nonetheless, the provisional government labeled Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks traitors and ordered them arrested. Lenin had to flee to Finland.

Meanwhile, however, the provisional government itself was collapsing. The coalition between liberals and socialists was breaking apart as their respective power bases — bourgeoisie and proletariat — demanded they move further to the right or left. Prime Minister Kerensky’s unwavering support for the war lost him all credit with the army, the only force that might have saved him and democratic government in Russia. In early September an attempted right-wing military coup failed as Petrograd workers organized themselves as Red Guards to defend the city and then convinced the coup’s soldiers to join them. Although the workers’ actions were organized by local unions and factories — the Bolshevik leaders had no hand in stopping the coup — the Bolsheviks gained more support nevertheless. The Bolsheviks were untainted by any association with the provisional government or the bourgeoisie and were seen as the only party completely committed to a proletarian revolution. Lenin, from his exile in Finland, now called for an armed Bolshevik insurrection before the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in early November.

In October the Bolsheviks gained a fragile majority in the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin did not return to Russia until mid-October and even then remained in hiding. It was Lenin’s supporter Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), an independent radical Marxist and later the commander of the Red Army, who brilliantly executed the Bolshevik seizure of power. On November 6 militant Trotsky followers joined with trusted Bolshevik soldiers to seize government buildings and arrest provisional government members. That evening Lenin came out of hiding and took control of the revolution. The following day revolutionary forces seized the Winter Palace, and Kerensky capitulated. At the Congress of Soviets, a Bolshevik majority declared that all power had passed to the soviets and named Lenin head of the new government.

The Bolsheviks came to power for three key reasons. First, by late 1917 democracy had given way to anarchy as the popular masses no longer supported the provisional government. Second, in Lenin and Trotsky the Bolsheviks had a truly superior leadership who were utterly determined to provoke a Marxist revolution. Third, the Bolsheviks appealed to soldiers, urban workers, and peasants who were exhausted by war and eager for socialism.