1905: Dress Rehearsal for October Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

In describing the principal stages in the development of the Bolshevik Party, V.I. Lenin pointed to the rich experience acquired in the 1905 Revolution in Russia. That experience, combined with a foundation in Marxist theory and the steeling of its cadres in the years of reaction (1907-10), was crucial in preparing the Bolshevik Party to lead the proletariat to power in the October Revolution of 1917.

All classes came out into the open. All programmatical and tactical views were tested by the action of the masses. In its extent and acuteness, the strike struggle had no parallel anywhere in the world. The economic strike developed into a political strike, and the latter into insurrection. The relations between the proletariat, as the leader, and the vacillating and unstable peasantry, as the led, were tested in practice. The Soviet form of organisation came into being in the spontaneous development of the struggle. The controversies of that period over the significance of the Soviets anticipated the great struggle of 1917-20. The alternation of parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle, of the tactics of boycotting parliament and that of participating in parliament, of legal and illegal forms of struggle, and likewise their interrelations and connections—all this was marked by an extraordinary wealth of content. As for teaching the fundamentals of political science to masses and leaders, to classes and parties alike, each month of this period was equivalent to an entire year of “peaceful” and “constitutional” development. Without the “dress rehearsal” of 1905, the victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible.

—V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920)