Leaders (Victor Serge)

Streetdemonstration, Nevskii Prospect, Petrograd, July 4, 1917, just after troops of the ProvisionalGovernment opened fire with machine guns.

         The Bolshevik party had been marchingtoward the seizure of power, with its astonishing steadfastness, lucidity andskill, ever since the fall of the autocracy. To be convinced of this it is necessary simply to read Letters From Afar, written by Lenin beforehis departure from Zurich in March 1917. But perhaps, like any historical definition that tries to be precise,that is too narrow a statement.  Theparty had been marching towards power ever since the day when its obscureCentral Committee of émigrés (like Lenin and Zinoviev) declared, in 1914, that ‘imperialistwar must be translated into civil war,’ or since the even earlier day when itwas born as a party of civil war at the London Congress of 1903.

PetrogradMilitary Committee of the Bolsheviks, 1917. Standing: Galkin, Kedrov,Paniushkin. Seated: Orlov, Mekhenoshin, Nevskii, Podvoiskii, Dashkevich,Raskolnikov

     When Lenin arrived in Petrograd on 3April, 1917, he proceeded to amend the political line of the party’s centralnewspaper ; this done, he set aboutdefining the objectives of the working class. Tirelessly he urged the Bolshevik militants to use persuasion to win theworking masses.  In the first days ofJuly when an infuriated popular upsurge broke for the first time against theKerensky administration, the Bolsheviks refused to follow this movement.  These are leaders, in the real sense of theword, who are refusing to be led.

Vladimir Tatlin, Proposed Monument to the Third International in Petrograd, 1920 

Excerpt from Victor Serge, Year One Of The Russian Revolution, translated and edited by Peter Sedgwick, Chicago, Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1972