Trotsky ari Petrograd - June 1911 75 years after October 1917 Red guards the Tsar to establish a constituent assembly. They were ignored.
From exile in Geneva, Lenin insisted (learning the lessons from the abortive European revolutions of 1848) that the bourgeoisie could not be entrusted with the tasks of the democratic revolution. He argued that only a revolutionary provisional government, brought to power by the workers and peasants, could establish a genuine democratic and functioning constituent assembly.
Lenin expressed this in his call for the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. In his view this would still be a bourgeois government: but the workers and peasants would be the driving force of the revolution.
The workers would need to continue their independent struggles and build their own class leadership after the establishment of the 'democratic dictatorship'. The Mensheviks, in contrast, looked forward to collaboration with the bourgeoisie in a prolonged period of capitalist development.
Trotsky, however, returning from exile, was the first to translate Plekhanov's 1889 insistence on the working class character of the revolution, and Karl Marx's post mortem of the 1848 revolutions, into a direct claim to working class power in Russia.
'Stages' theory rejected He argued for a rejection of dogmatic notions of 'stages' of development, and lapsed.
As Cossack troops were sent out to repress the strikers, barricades again went up and workers raided gun shops.
Most significantly, the events saw on October 13 the birth from the printers' strike committee of the St Petersburg soviet (council). Though it began with delegates from only one district, soon 500 delegates from across the country were attending, and an executive including three Bolsheviks, three Mensheviks and three Social Revolutionaries was elected. The soviet launched a newspaper Izvestiya (lidings) on October 17.
At this point the Tsar, in a change of tactics, picked a new prime minister and issued à manifesto promising a constitution, civil liberties and universal suffrage.
Face value
While the liberals took all this at face value and celebrated, Trotsky, speaking at a huge rally in the university, hailed the developments as the first great victory of the working class, but warned:
"Do not hasten to celebrate victory: it is not yet complete. Does the promissory note weigh as much as pure gold?
"Are the gates of our prisons open? ... The Tsar's manifesto... see! It is only a scrap of paper. Today it has been given to us, and tomorrow it will be taken away and torn into pieces as I am now tearing it to pieces, this paper-liberty,