Question by About a girl ~ Shell: How influencial would you say Lenin’s role was in the Oct 1917 revolution?
Some say that Trotsky played more of a part, since Lenin was absent from Russia before April, and then absent again after the July days.
There were also the failings of the provisional government… But then again, couldn’t you say that it’s was Lenin’s insightful character that was responsible for the revolution, because he saw that he could take advantage of the unresolved war and land problems?
Thanks =D
Answers and Views:
Answer by jones
I’d have to say Lenin’s influence was more or less incalculable. While you correctly point out that Trotsky stayed in Russia much of the time ofLenin’s exile, Lenin was the driving spirit of the Bolsheviks, the one who, after the split with the Whites, insisted on the Reds becoming a small cadre of professional revolutionaries, men and women for whom fomenting revolution was a full time occupation. Trotsky certainly fits this description as well and with no less ardor than Lenin, but to believe Lenin’s absence from Russia in critical times diminishes his influence is, to me, to forget all Lenin had done prior to ’17, whether in Russia or in Europe, to propagandize and solidify the Bolshevik platform.
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scooter_the_squirrel says
In 1895, he founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the consolidation of the city's Marxist groups; as an embryonic revolutionary party, the League were active among the Russian labour organisations. On 7 December 1895, Lenin was arrested for plotting against Tsar Alexander III, and was then imprisoned for fourteen months in solitary confinement Cell 193 of the St. Petersburg Remand Prison.[14] In February 1897, he was exiled to eastern Siberia, to the village Shushenskoye in the Minusinsky District, Yenisei Gubernia. There, he met Georgy Plekhanov, the Marxist who introduced socialism to Russia. In July 1898, Lenin married the socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya, and, in April 1899, he published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia[15] (1899), under pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyin; one of the thirty theoretical works he wrote in exile.[
At exile's end in 1900, Lenin left Russia and lived in Munich (1900–1902), London (1902–1903) – where a memorial plaque at Percy Circus WC1, King's Cross marks his residence – and Geneva (1903–1905).[16] In 1900 he and Julius Martov (later a leading opponent) co-founded the newspaper Iskra (Spark), and published articles and books about revolutionary politics, whilst recruiting for the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which had held its first congress in 1898 whilst Lenin was still in exile in Siberia.[17] In such clandestine political work, Vladimir Ulyanov assumed aliases, and, in 1902, adopted Lenin as his definitive nom de guerre, derived from the Siberian Lena River.[3]
In 1903, Lenin attended the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which initially convened at Brussels before moving to London. Here a longstanding ideological split developed within the party between the Bolshevik faction, led by Lenin, and the Menshevik faction, led by Martov. These terms "Bolshevik" (from the Russian bol'shinstvo meaning "majority") and "Menshevik" (from the Russian menshinstvo meaning "minority") derive from the narrow Bolshevik electoral defeat of the Mensheviks to the party's newspaper editorial board, and to central committee leadership.[18] The break partly originated from Lenin's book What Is to Be Done? (1902), which proposed a smaller party organisation of professional revolutionaries, with Iskra in a primary ideologic role. Another issue which divided the two factions was Lenin's support of a worker-peasant alliance to overthrow the Tsarist regime as opposed to the Menshevik's support on an alliance between the working classes and the liberal bourgeoise to achieve the same aim (whilst a small third faction led by Trotsky espoused the view that the working class alone was the instrument of revolutionary change – needing no help from either the peasants or the middle classes).[19]
An example of how influential he was even before the main Revolution.