18715
JANUARY 1917.
a.
SOURCES.
Engels in Neue Zeit, 1901, on the criticism of the Erfurt Programme.[2]
NB: Trotsky: "Russia in the Period of Revolution"
Petition of January 9. p. 55, Tr[otsky]
Conclusion
(Beg[inning] and end)[3]
b.
PLAN.
1)) January 22 (January 9) = beginning of the revolution. The war accelerated it.
2) Brief account of events from January 22.[4]
3)) The greatest changes.
(Struve, January 7: No revolutionary p[eople].[5] p. 59. Trotsky).
Gapon - priest-revolutionary
Petition to the tsar-father. Revolution.
-
Direct action of the masses against the head of state power.
Revolutionaries: a small group (several hundred people) - leaders of the proletariat and, by that fact, leaders of the revolution
Tr[otsky]. p. 423 at the end
4) Strikes, the first revolution in world history which can best and most accurately be understood and studied from the (history) statistics of strikes.[6]

5) 45 ...(1895-1904) 80 (1903);
2800 (1905) - 400 (January 1905)[7]
(in one month as many as in the 10 years before the revolution)
6) Waves of strikes
Vanguard and rearguard[8]
Metalworkers and those lagging behind
The North and the North-West = the vanguard...
[
7) Economic and political strikes
8) Spring 1905 - beginning of the peasant movement... (content of the bourgeois revolution)
9) June 28 (15), 1905 - uprising on the Potemkin...
10) Three waves: the wave of strikes - the first, leading wave; the independently organised peasant movement - almost incomparable (considerably weaker)
(unfortunately only 1/15 - 2,000 burned out of 30,000)[9]
11) Boycott of the August Duma... parliamentarism...
Military uprisings (cf. 1825 against 1905).
12) Culminating point: October and December 1905:
Meetings at the university... p. 174. Tr[otsky]. Kharkov
23.X.1905[10] |
October: the first mass strike of a political and revolutionary character throughout the whole country.
(+ Railwaymen, postal officials.[11] p. 69. Trotsky)
Manifesto of October 30 (17), 1905.
XII: Moscow uprising... p. 224 Trotsky: Gorky.[12]
| 9 days: p. 224 Trotsky[13] |
(Max Weber on the role of the "Lenin group"[14]...
219: Tr[otsky]. Cannon, October 25, 1905, in Moscow.[15]
222: Moscow 1905. Berlin 1848.[16]
("The eight-hour
working
day
and
arms."
p. 464,
Tr[otsky].[17]
Maximum of political strikers... The eight-hour working day. Withdrawal of the bourgeoisie. Lockouts.
Maximum of the peasant movement...
Maximum of military uprisings...
185-6 (Tr[otsky]: workers and peasants in the military uprising).[18]
Soviets of Workers' Deputies...
13) Victory of the counter-revolution (December 1905).[19]...
Loan of 2,000 million francs: spring 1906! (NB).

14) Attempts to renew the offensive.
First Duma (spring 1906)... (Peasant Party + Social-Democrats). Wave of strikes and the last wave of the peasant movement.
Second
Duma (spring 1907)... No peasant movement
a weak wave of strikes.
15) The coup d'etat of June 3 (16), 1907. Beginning of the counter-revolutionary epoch, down to 1912.
16) Significance: (a) Russia is being renewed (Leo Tolstoy regrets it)[20]
(beta) Asia is in revolt (Turkey, Persia, China)
(gamma) European working-class movement: Austria.
(delta) Prototype and prologue of the coming European
revolution.[21]
proletarian in a certain sense
Prototype and prologue in four respects:
(a) a concrete idea of the growing activity
of the masses. ((Strikes))
(beta) The role of the mass strike
NB
"Latent socialism"
(Engels).[22]
*) The best exposition in German:
Rosa Luxemburg (in connection
with the West-European peculiarities
of the struggle)...
NB Polish pupils[23]
245
[
c
203
Rosa
Luxemburg:
"The Mass
Strike,
the Party and the Trade Unions"
(Hamburg 1906,
(gamma) Drawing the military, the army, into the struggle.
III (delta) Civil war. (Cf. Kautsky in "The Social
Revolution" (1902), "The Coming Revolution"...
"will less resemble a sudden rising
against the
authorities
and more
a civil
war"... p. 48.

b.
ADDITIONS TO THE PLAN.
About 70 million dessiatines - big landed estates
About 70
"
" - poorest peasants
+ Dissemination of Social-Democratic literature
National movements
+ Jewish pogroms of October 1905: 100 towns, 4,000 killed,
10,000 maimed
// p. 4. Tr[otsky].[24]
c.
NOTES
ON THE
ARTICLE:
MAX
WEBER
"RUSSIA'S
TRANSITION
TO PSEUDO-CONSTITUTIONALISM".
Europe is pregnant with revolution. The revolutionary situation
is already present: governments are at an impasse.
Horrors of war
High cost of living
Burden of debts (hundreds of milliards)
The bourgeois public, the opportunists, the social-patriots think that the revolution in Russia was something "extra-European" in the sense that this revolution, as it were, did not touch Europe, that it belongs to Europe's past and not to Europe's future.
Great mistake! It happened once in a backward country where the proletariat was still too weak for victory and yet strong enough to stand at the head of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. It must happen so again, it certainly will happen so in the most advanced countries of Europe, where the proletariat has long been strong enough to lead the masses of the exploited to the social revolution, to the seizure of power, to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the banks (finance capital), and the big enterprises. The old people may perhaps not live to see it. But the youth certainly...

Max Weber, p. 259 (95), note. It would be more correct to translate "uyezd" as Bezirk (and not "Kreis").[25]
281 (53) [note] 42-a - 283: beks and meks.[26] cf. 284
(120)
284 (56), note. "Putsch" (December 1905).[27]...
- same, 465 (1), title[28]
"Mass burning of manors": 179 (15)[29]
? 319 (155), note 232-a (Wilhelm II on expropriation)[30] cf. 390 (226)[31]
(343 (115): [note] 86-b)
"The Lenin group and a section of the Socialist-Revolutionaries had long been preparing this senseless uprising".[32]...
Max Weber (Dr., Professor) (1906): "Toward an Assessment of Russia's Contemporary Political Development"...

1 The document consists of materials for the report "On the Revolution of 1905", written by Lenin in German. The report was delivered at a meeting organised by working youth at the People's House in Zurich on January 22 (9), 1917. Lenin began work on the report in the twenties of December 1916, as is evident from his letter to Karpinsky of December 20, 1916 (see Works, Vol. XXIX, p. 279). The report in full, in German and Russian, is given in Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 18-54, and in Russian in Works, Vol. XIX, pp. 343-357.
2 Engels's article in Neue Zeit, XX. Jahrgang, 1901-1902, Band I, SS. 5-13, under the title "Zur Kritik des sozialdemokratischen Programmentwurfes 1891" ("Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891"). Lenin dwells in detail on this work by Engels in his pamphlet "The State and Revolution" (see Works, Vol. XXI, pp. 415-420).
3 The reference is to the book: N. Trotzky, Russland in der Revolution, Verlag Raden & Co., Dresden, 1909, SS. 359 + V.
4 See Works, Vol. XIX, pp. 344-345, or Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 22-23.
5 Lenin quotes Struve's article "The Urgent Tasks of the Moment", printed in No. 63 of Osvobozhdeniye of January 20 (7), 1905. In the report Lenin adds to the words of Struve quoted here: "To this 'highly educated', arrogant and arch-stupid leader of the bourgeois reformists it seemed absurd that an illiterate peasant country could give birth to a revolutionary people" (Works, Vol. XIX, p. 344; Lenin Miscellany V, p. 23). The quotation was taken by Lenin from the German edition of Trotsky's book, p. 59 (Russian ed., p. 80).
6 The statistics of strikes are given by Lenin in the report (see Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 24-25).
7 The figures indicated mean: a) 45... (1895-1904) - "the average annual number of strikers in Russia during the 10 years before the revolution was 43,000" (Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 24-25; Works, Vol. XIX, p. 346); b) 80 (1903) - during the general strike in the South in 1903, 80,000 workers were on strike; c) 2,800 (1905) - "The total number of strikers (in 1905. Ed.) was 2,800,000" (ibid.); d) 400 (January 1905) - "In January 1905, the first month of the revolution, the number of strikers was 440,000. Thus, in one month alone there were more than in the whole preceding decade" (ibid.).
8 In the report Lenin says: "The three large cities in which the most class-conscious and most numerous workers live, St. Petersburg, Riga and Warsaw, show an incomparably larger number of strikers in relation to the total number of workers than all other cities, not to speak of the countryside" (see Works, Vol. XIX, p. 346, or Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 26-27).
9 Reporting in the address that "the peasants burned down up to 2,000 manors", Lenin goes on to say: "Unfortunately, the peasants at that time destroyed only one-fifteenth of the total number of landed estates, only one-fifteenth of what they ought to have destroyed in order completely to wipe from the face of the Russian land the shame of feudal large landed property" (see Works, Vol. XIX, pp. 353-354; Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 42-43).
10 This refers to the following passage from Trotsky's book: "In Kharkov, on October 10, after a meeting, the crowd took possession of an arms shop. On the 11th, workers and students erected barricades near the university." (The quotation is from the Russian translation: Trotsky - 1905, GIZ, Moscow, 1922, p. 97. Hereafter all references to the Russian translation are to this edition.)
11 This refers to the October general strike of railwaymen and postal employees.
12 References to the following passage: "Many people think, writes Gorky, who was then in Moscow, that the revolutionaries began to build the barricades; this is, of course, very flattering, but not quite correct - it was precisely the ordinary man, the non-party man, who began to build the barricades, and therein lies the essence of the event" (Russian ed., p. 223).
13 The reference is to the following passage: "The uprising in Moscow lasted nine days: from the 9th (22nd) to the 17th (30th)."
14 The reference is to Max Weber's book Russlands Uebergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus ("Russia's Transition to Pseudo-Constitutionalism"), Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Bd. V, Tubingen, J. C. B. Mohr, 1906, SS. 165-401, from which the report cites the following passage: "The Lenin group... and a section of the S.R.s had long been preparing this senseless uprising" (see Works, Vol. XIX, p. 355, or Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 46-47).
15 These are references to the following passage: "On December 12 (25), the fighting squads wrested a cannon from dragoons and artillerymen. For a quarter of an hour they busied themselves around it, not knowing what to do with it. They were extricated from their difficulty by a large detachment of dragoons and Cossacks, which seized the gun" (Russian ed., p. 229).
16 The reference is to the following passage: "The uprising tore from the midst of the Moscow population about 1,000 dead and as many wounded. Among them were 86 children, including infants at the breast. These figures become more vivid if one recalls that on the pavements of Berlin, as a result of the March uprising of 1848, when Prussian absolutism received an incurable wound, only 183 corpses remained" (Russian ed., p. 232).
17 The reference is to the following passage from the speech of the reporter of the Executive Committee of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies at a meeting of the Soviet: "If we did not win the eight-hour working day for the masses, we won the masses for the eight-hour working day. Henceforth in the heart of every Petersburg worker lives his battle-cry: eight hours and a gun" (Russian ed., p. 178).
18 The reference is to the passage which speaks of the rapid and resolute adherence to the revolution of the technical troops, recruited from workers, and of the indecision and wavering of the infantry, recruited from the peasantry (Russian ed., pp. 197-198).
19 In the report Lenin says: "With the suppression of the December uprising the descending line of the revolution begins. In this period too there are extremely interesting moments; one need only recall the two attempts by the most militant elements of the working class to halt the retreat of the revolution and prepare a new offensive" (Works, Vol. XIX, p. 356, or Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 48-49).
20 Lenin, in his article "The Election Campaign and the Election Platform" (Works, Vol. XV, p. 219), writes: "Leo Tolstoy said shortly before his death, and said with the regret characteristic of the worst sides of 'Tolstoyism', that the Russian people had learned with extraordinary speed 'to make a revolution'." Here Lenin has in mind L. N. Tolstoy's preface to N. Orlov's album "Russian Peasants" (the preface is dated June 26, 1908).
21 On the Russian revolution as a prototype of the European revolution see Works, Vol. XIX, p. 357, or Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 50-51.
22 In speaking of latent (latenter) socialism, Lenin has in mind the following passage from Engels's letter to Sorge of February 22, 1888: "And here, too, the masses are being more and more possessed by an instinctive socialism, which, fortunately, resists every definite formulation according to the dogma of this or that so-called organisation, and therefore at decisive events it will the more easily seize them. The movement has only to break through at one point for the bourgeoisie to be amazed at the hitherto latent socialism which from that moment will burst outward and become manifest" (Letters of J. P. Becker, J. Dietzgen, F. Engels, K. Marx and others to F. A. Sorge and others, ed. N. G. Dauge, 1907, p. 321).
23 Whom Lenin had in mind has not been possible to establish. One word is written illegibly: it resembles "Karevich".
24 The reference is to the following passage from Trotsky's book: "In the black October bacchanalia... 100 towns lost from three and a half to four thousand killed and up to 10,000 maimed" (Russian ed., p. 133) (see Works, Vol. XIX, p. 355, or Lenin Miscellany V, pp. 46-47).
25 Lenin sets out in his own words note 43 in Max Weber's article "Russlands Uebergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus" in Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Bd. 23, 1906. (Max Weber, "Russia's Transition to Pseudo-Constitutionalism", see Archives of Social Science and Social Policy, Vol. 23, 1906.) All the following page references by Lenin are to this same edition of the Archiv and to Weber's articles. The corresponding volume of the Archiv is indicated in parentheses.
26 In note 42a on p. 281 (53) of M. Weber's "Zur Lage der burgerlichen Demokratie in Russland", printed in Archiv, 22. Band (M. Weber, "On the Position of Bourgeois Democracy in Russia"), it is said: "The dissension began at the Second Party Congress (1903) in the struggle for Iskra, which had been published in Geneva before 1903 by Axelrod, Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and 'Starover'. Only Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin were re-elected. The two latter stood on opposite positions both on questions of party organisation (Lenin was a 'centralist') and on questions of tactics (Lenin was considered a 'Jacobin', Martov a 'Girondist'). Plekhanov tried to reconcile both, but in the end also joined Martov. Lenin left and founded Vperyod, but Plekhanov too left the editorial board of Iskra in 1905 and thereafter published (alone) Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata (in irregular issues of half a sheet, octavo), which stood 'above parties'."
27 On the page indicated by Lenin, note 44a says: "... 'Revolution' was demanded by Nachalo (No. 3), published with Plekhanov's closest participation, and it furiously attacked the bourgeois liberals because they were not for it - knowing that by the word 'revolution' the masses understand something quite concrete. If the masses come out and the putsch ends unsuccessfully, if thousands of beardless ideologists in Moscow lie on the pavements, as today (December 27), then the uprising will be declared an 'unfortunate frivolity', and the opinion will be expressed that revolution can succeed only in the event of sympathy on the part of the bourgeoisie. If the masses then ask in amazement what, in that case, the demand for 'revolution' meant, they will hear with amazement that it means something exceedingly abstract, very far from what they understood by the word; and that they should have listened to the orthodox and not to the Socialist-Revolutionaries or to the Leninist heretics! In exactly the same way, when driven to the wall, the defender of miracles saves himself by declaring that the genuine and ultimately the only 'miracle' is precisely 'development' and the everyday course of things. Such double tactics are not the product of any dishonesty. Plekhanov had already expressed the same thing in the November issue of his Dnevnik (No. 3, pp. 16 and 21)."
28 This refers to the title of Weber's article: "Russia's Transition to Pseudo-Constitutionalism".
29 At this point Weber says: "Much more important for the political appraisal of events is the question of what, properly speaking, this regime has achieved. Larger uprisings, of course, have everywhere been suppressed. The mass burning of manors ceased after it had caused losses, the scale of which can be determined only approximately (for 17 European gubernias (out of 61) an official sum of 31.3 million rubles was indicated, with Saratov showing the maximum of 9 1/2 million rubles), and which the insurance companies refused to cover, citing the war clause, a sharp contrast with America after the San Francisco earthquake" (Vol. 23).
30 Weber writes: "This newspaper (Novoye Vremya), among other things, had the impudence to print in No. 10741 a 'communication from its correspondent' alleging that Emperor Wilhelm expressed to Mr. Kokovtsov, whom he received during the latter's passage through Berlin, his regret when he received a negative reply to the question whether any project of alienation of property was being prepared: 'A pity, that would have untied my hands. You in Russia forget that this is a question of international significance'" (Vol. 23).
31 Lenin has in mind here the following passage: "The 'Tatar' communication, which was apparently fabricated by Deputy Minister Gurko in the newspaper considered an officious organ (Rossiya), about Austria's and Germany's readiness to undertake intervention in favour of the old regime, and which Petrunkevich too, incomprehensibly, mentioned, increased the nervousness of the Duma."
32 See note 14 to the present document.