Fin de Siècle Russia, 1891-1917 Presentation: The October Revolution, 1917 Topics of 1917 in Past Papers > Increasing tensions and unrest in 1917 from February onwards > The demands of the mass people and the appeal of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' Deputies > Hope for the future from a Bolshevik perspective Class Conflict Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists & The Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, 1955) > Lenin's 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward': This work provided a most impressive presentation of the political and psychological rationale for Lenin's vision of party Organization. Lenin had finally brought forth a clear if somewhat discursive Statement of the Bolshevik view of Organization. - > The Bolshevik philosophy/ the sanction of a party organization: No rank-and- file Social Democrat could develop and consistently maintain socialist consciousness and will without participating in and identifying with a party Organization; the party alone could give to the personality of its individual members its consciousness and its form. - > Two basic characteristics in Lenin' organizational plan: The first was its emphatic distinction between the leading ranks of the movement and the surrounding, though active elements, a differentiation that Lenin had designed to correspond to the differences in the levels of consciousness present in the Social Democratic movement. The second was an insistence on firm discipline and continuous interference by the central party institutions in all the expressions of the life of local party organizations. > 1905 Revolution: The Russian autocracy had been living on borrowed time. The attempt to superimpose upon the edifice of absolutism the appurtenances of a modern state had resulted in the development of insoluble contradictions in every sphere of Russian life. The industrial giants that Witte had constructed at so great a cost could not be supported by the pauperized and discontented peasantry, and the generous government policy of industrial subsidies and protective tariffs had alienated the autocracy's long-standing ally, the land- owning gentry, which through the agency of the zemstva was now raising increasingly heretical outcries. - > Not only had the attempt to modernize the Russian State proved economically unsound, but it had also given birth to two new social groups - the professional classes and the industrial proletariat - for which no place could be found in the old caste society. And the various palliatives to which the government had sporadically resorted to allay the dissatisfactions of these two groups (the most recent of which had been the Zubatov policy of government-sponsored trade-unionismfi had succeeded only in increasing the articulateness of both the workers and the intelligentsia. > Lenin's tactics: The Social Democrats' duty to expose it in no way precluded the possibility or the desirability of continued agitation among bourgeois
Opposition elements. It meant merely that these two facets of the activity of Social Democracy - agitation and exposure - had to be judiciously combined, so as not to frighten the bourgeoisie and yet to press upon it the proletariat's political demands. If Lenin's tactics were adopted,