The Role Of Leninism In Imperial Russia

The revolutions that occurred in Imperial Russia happened in February (old style, or Julian calendar) or March (new style, or Gregorian calendar) Revolution and The October (old style) or November (new style) Revolution. The February phase begun on March 8, 1917 when what initially began as bread and food riots (a common popular response to the sacrifices and privations exacted from the majority of the Russian population) in Saint Petersburg soon escalated into more organized resistance and rebellion as workers, peasants, and soldiers/sailors organized themselves into councils, or Soviets, through which each constituency pushed their own interests and also coordinated with the others. The soviets, along with the largely discontented bourgeoisie
Although he was fully aware of the obvious limitations imposed by Russia's economic and industrial backwardness, he nevertheless aggressively propounded Russia's revolutionary potential, particularly in the international arena. Yes, with only 18% of its population qualifying as industrial workers in the Classical Marxist sense, another 10% as an educated urban-secular bourgeoisie, and the remaining 72% as rural muzhiki (peasants) at the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Russia obviously did not fit the Classical Marxist model internally speaking. As such, Russia lacked what Marxists saw as the key active agent to bring about socialist revolution, an advanced, class-conscious industrial proletariat, such as was increasingly abundant in the industrially advanced countries of Europe and North America. But recall that Russia was an anomaly straddling the twilight between internally underdeveloped "third world" country and a global
Their disagreement had one common root: Russia's economic, technological, and social backwardness. For Trotsky, these problems, while internal to Russia, were only resolvable by Soviet Russia's spreading of socialist revolution to other countries, most especially to the advanced industrial capitalist countries for the reasons we already saw in analyzing Lenin's international line. Trotsky believed that unless the leading imperialist countries underwent socialist revolution, Russia's own socialist development was eventually doomed because socialist Russia would always be encircled by powerful capitalist/imperialist enemies. He therefore promulgated the line called Permanent Revolution. As noted earlier, in 1918-1919, these notions were not too farfetched, not only in regards to Germany, but also in other European countries like Hungary (a key fact in political science is that countries which experience major military defeats, such as Hungary and Germany, are very susceptible to internal upheaval and even revolution in the immediate aftermath). Indeed, it was with this in mind that in 1919, The Comintern (or the Third Communist International) was founded in Moscow as an umbrella organization to help promote Soviet-style revolutions in other countries. But again, the abortion of revolutionary prospects in Germany, and the destruction of the short-lived Bela Kun