75 YEARS after the Russian Revolution, only Trotskyists, today's consistent marxists uphold the principles that created it. IN JANUARY 1905 a political strike ci 100,000 St Petersburg workers brought the city to a standstill. On January 9, a mass demonstration of workers - dressed in Sundav-best and led by a priest - marched to the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar.
Dozens were brutally gunned down by Tsarist officers: but with the victims perished many illusions of peacefully winning reforms from the autocracy. Barricades were thrown up in the work. ing class districts, and street fighting broke out.
When the first wave of fighting ebbed, towards the end of February 1905, the 'liberal' capitalists and academics held conferences and banquets, politely to press their request for for a recognition of the international character and uneven development of capitalism, as well as the impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie and the vacillations of the peasantry.
Trotsky argued that the only consistent revolutionary class was the proletariat, which had to take the leadership of thedemocraticrevolution, and carry it through as part of its own, socialist, revolution - establishing not a 'democratic bourgeois regime, but the dictatorship of the proletariat.
For this analysis, Trotsky revived Marx'sterminology after 1848, referring to it as the 'permanent [uninterrupted, unbroken] revolution'. It was to be the key to the October events of 1917.
These debates were far from abstract exchanges. The relative calm of the summer of 1905 broke down with a new wave of strikes in October.
Typesetters in St Petersburg came out demanding wage increases, triggering stoppages in other industries. Political demands for constiturional rights were Or Ocorer :, Moscow-Kazan railworkers joined the stoppage, and within a week the rail network was paralysed. Postal and telegraph workers walked out, schools and universities closed and commerce colbefore your very eyes."
Though the general strike was called off, the soviet continued to organise, raiding each major print works in turn to force them to print Izvestiya, edited by Trotsky. The soviet threw down its challenge to the Tsarist state on the censorship issue, deciding that:
'Only those newspapers maybe published whose editors ignore the censorship committees, refuse to submit their issues for censorship, and generally act in the same way as the soviet in publishingitsown paper... Newspapers which fail to accept the present resolution will be confiscated from their sellers."
In this way the soviet had gone far beyond its original task of strike co-ordination: it was now championing political demands and workers' control in defiance of the central state apparatus.
The Tsar could not even find a commercial printer for his manifesto. There was a dual power in the land: the power of the soviet was challenging the authority of the state machinery.
Two weeks after the general strike ended, another massive general strike showed the power of the movement. The demands were for an end to the Tsar's imposition of martial law in Poland, and against the court-martial
and execution of mutineers at the Kronstadt fortress. _A five-day strike brought total victory to the workers - on two issues which not even the most blinkered 'economist could have claimed were traae unon concerns.
This politicisation of the working class alarmed the liberal bourgeoisie as much as the Tsar. They began to swing back behind the government, creating conditions for a new state crackdown.
At the end of November, the president of the St Petersburg soviet was arrested: Trotsky was elected in his place. On December 2-3 he, and the other officers of the soviet were also arrested. Uprisings led by the Moscow soviet and in St Petersburg were left isolated from peasant support and most of the army: they were ruthlessly repressed. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Nadezhada Konstantinovna Krupskaya - Key organisers of the revolution and colonies, the politics of reformist social democracy could only play the most reactionary role. Wedded as it was to capitalism and seeking reforms from its 'own' national capitalist class, reformism degenerated into a 'social patriotism' which reinforced the official chauvinism of the imperialist governments and helped line up worker against worker in the service of the bosses.
The Bolshevik line on the war flowed from this internationalist, class analysis. The opportunity of the war should be - exploited by the workers - to turn their guns on their 'own' ruling class, and turn the imperialist war in each country into a civil war.
In Russia the war was both a disgrace and a catastrophe by any terms. Out of fifteen million Russians mobilised, two Anniversary special The autumn of 1916 saw growing agitation and mobilisation in the factories, increasing Bolshevik propaganda; political strikesand demonstrations; fraternisation between workers and soldiers, and revolutionary activity among sailors of the Baltic fleet.
Bitter resentment against the Tsar developed at all levels. Even the 'rank and file nobility showed their irritation in December, es, - the showed their irritation in December, by ordering the murder of Rasputin, the mystic who had exercised a hypnotic power over all aspects of royal policy.
By January 1917, 575,000 workers were out on political strikes, and the onset of bread rationing provoked mass resistance on February 19. On 21 February workers at the giant Putilov worksin Petrograd (St Petersburg) were locked out after demanding a fifty perand breaking the resistance of the LOUIS.
On February 27 the first company of troops mutinied and shot their commander. They swiftly approached other barracks, and began to disarm police, distribute arms and free jailed political The same day saw the Petrograd soviet formed once again, setting up at the Tauride palace, where the duma sat. Unable to mobilise forces to contain the Petrograd rebellion, and begged by his generals to abdicate, the Tsar did so on March 2. The Mensheviks and the capitalist Kadet party were still terrified of a revival of Tsarism - and eyen more fearful of the awakening working class. Though the workers and soldiers called upon them to take power, they would not do so.
Dropping demands
The workers and soldiers controlled Petrograd, holding the state bank, the treasury, the mint and the post office. Only the soviet was recognised as the authority. Yet the Mensheviks and SR leaders of the soviet promptly dropped all of the demands for which workers had been fighting - the eight hour day, land reform, peace and the republic. Instead they meekly sought freedom for political parties and an elected constituent assembly some time in the future.
It was on this feeble basis that the leaders of the soviet gave their endorsement to a bourgeois provisional government which included the SR Kerensky as minister of justice.
Only fifteen out of 900 votes at the soviet were cast against the provisional government, but as Trotsky pointed out:
"In voting for such leaders, the proletarians and peasantry erected a partition wall between themselves and their own aims. They could not move forward at all without knocking into this wall erected by themselves, knocking it over."
This began quickly, when militant soldiers marched to the soviet demanding support for political rights- and the right of army units to elect their own officers.
Under pressure, and against their own wishes, the soviet leaders were obliged to agree and endorse this in General Order No. 1, which also asserted soviet control over all troop movements in
Trotsky revived Marx's terminology after 1848, referring to the 'permanent [uninterrupted, unbroken] revolution'. It was to be the key to the October events of 1917.