1 Lenin, V. I., Sočinenija, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1931), IV, 382 Google Scholar.

2 Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, ed. Adoratski, V. (Moscow, 1935), Part 3, III, 346 Google Scholar.

3 Marx, K. and Engels, F., Sočinenija, ed. Adoratski, V. (Moscow, 1935), XXVI, 480 Google Scholar. Marx to Friedrich-Albert Sorge, September 27, 1877: “The crisis (the Russo-Turkish War) is the new turning point in the history of Europe. Russia … has long been on the eve of an overturn; all elements thereto are already present … the revolution will begin, as usual, in a scuffle over a constitution, but then will develop into a regular brawl. If mother nature is not too unmerciful with us we may yet live to see this event. … The entire structure of Russian society is now in a state of economic, moral and intellectual dissolution. The revolution this time will begin in the East, formerly the impregnable citadel and reserve army of the counter-revolution. … Mr. Bismarck looks with pleasure to the bloody strife but does not wish the matter to take place so fast. … If it comes to revolution, what becomes of the last prop of the Hohenzollern dynasty?”

4 As late as 1914, Lenin still thought of Tsarist Russia specifically as the Gendarme of Europe. This was his main reason for regarding Russia's defeat in World War I as a “lesser evil” than Russian victory. See Zinov'ev, G. E., USenie Marksa i Lenina o Vojne (Moscow, 1931), p. 176 Google Scholar.

5 In the foreword to his Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, Engels cites as one reason for the politically advanced position of the German working class in 1874 the fact that it had come late upon the proletarian stage and thus had learned from prior working class experiences in France and England. Lenin, by quoting this passage from Engels in his writing in 1902, means to prove that the Russian proletariat, last of all historically, had learned from English, French and German proletarian struggles and was therefore ahead of them all in terms of revolutionary wisdom. See Lenin, op. cit., IV, 381-382.

6 The bourgeoisie feared “an all too revolutionary attitude on the part of the working class which never stops with the democratic revolution but strives to achieve the socialist revolution. [The bourgeoisie] feared the total collapse of officialdom and bureaucracy whose interests are linked to those of the propertied classes by a thousand threads. One of the tasks of the proletariat is to drive the bourgeoisie forward and to place before the entire people slogans of a completely democratic revolution.” Lenin, op. cit., VII, 346-347.

7 The Bolshevik minimum program in 1905 included demands for a republic, an armed people, an eight-hour day, full democratic rights and freedoms for national minorities, etc.

8 Lenin, op. cit., VII, 191. See also pp. 297-298. “The Russian proletariat will know how to do its duty to the end. It will stand at the head of the people's armed uprising. It will not shrink from the difficult task of participating in the provisional revolutionary government if this task should fall to it. It will beat back all counter-revolutionary attempts, crush without mercy all enemies of freedom, defend the democratic republic and achieve our entire minimum program by revolutionary means. … Having been victorious in the forthcoming revolution, we shall have taken a gigantic step forward toward our socialist goal, we shall have liberated Europe from the heavy yoke of a reactionary military power and will help our brothers, the class conscious workers of the entire world, exhausted physically and spiritually in the struggle with bourgeois reaction, to take new courage in the success of the revolution in Russia and stride to Socialism with renewed vigor. With the help of the socialist proletariat, however, we shall succeed not only in maintaining the democratic republic but we shall also be able to advance toward Socialism with seven league strides.”

9 Leninskij Sbornik, ed. Kamenev, L. B. (Moscow, 1926), V, 48–50 Google Scholar.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Earlier in his address, Lenin had stated, “The peculiarity of the Russian revolution lay in the fact that it was bourgeois-democratic by content but in its method of struggle was proletarian. It was bourgeois-democratic since the goal which it directly strove for and which it could achieve with its forces alone was the democratic republic, the eight-hour working day, the confiscation of the enormous large landowners’ estates–measures which the bourgeois revolutions in France in 1792 and 1793 had achieved.

“The Russian revolution was at the same time also proletarian not only in the sense that the proletariat was the guiding force, the avant-garde of the movement, but also in the sense that the specifically proletarian means of battle, that is, the strikes, served as the means of shaking up the masses and was the most characteristic feature in the tidal flow of decisive events.

“The Russian revolution was the first–it will surely not have been the last– great revolution in world history, in which the political mass strike played a great role. In fact, the events of the Russian revolution cannot be understood without a statistical knowledge of the strikes that took place.” Ibid., pp. 23-25.

13 Lenin, op. cit., XII, 211–212.Google Scholar

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 213.

16 Lenin, V., Russkaja Revoljucija i zadačy proletariata, IX, 28–36.Google Scholar

17 Ausserordentlichen lnternationalen Sozialisten-Kongress zu Basel am 24 und 25 November, 1912 (Berlin, 1912), p. 27 Google Scholar.

18 Gankin, O. and Fisher, H., The Bolsheviks in the World War (Stanford, 1940), p. 79.Google Scholar

19 Ausserordentlichen, p. 26.

20 Ibid.

21 As cited in Gankin and Fisher, op. cit., pp. 85-86.

22 Ibid., p. 153.

23 Ibid., pp. 158-159.