April theses
April Theses is the short name of the political program that Lenin publicly presented in April 1917, immediately after his return from exile in Switzerland. In it he criticized, among other things, the Provisional Government that emerged from the February Revolution for its capitalist orientation and called for the establishment of a republic based on the Soviets , a nationalization of the land and the means of production , as well as the unconditional peace agreement with Germany (which he, after initial hesitation and despite strong Was able to enforce resistance, see Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ).
Creation and publication
Lenin held on April 4 jul. / April 17, 1917 greg. a presentation at a conference of the Petrograd Soviet in Petrograd on further political developments after the February Revolution. He then worked it out further in writing and called it On the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Current Revolution , later called April Theses for short . The text was published for the first time on April 7th July. / April 20, 1917 greg. in Pravda .
theses
The following main demands arose from the theses:
- All power to the Soviets
- Ending the war
- Expropriation of large estates and immediate land division ( all land for the farmers )
- Control of the workers over the industry
- Nationalization of the banks
- Establishment of a Soviet republic
- Overthrow of the Provisional Government
- Foundation of a revolutionary international
- Agitation and education of the masses and winning a Bolshevik majority in the councils
From then on the watchword was peace - freedom, land and bread!
effect
The reactions to Lenin's theses - also on the Bolshevik side - were initially overwhelmingly negative. The majority of the leading Bolsheviks, including Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin , believed that Russia had only just left the feudal stage behind and that a period of bourgeois-capitalist rule was necessary before the Russian people were "ripe" for a revolutionary one Remodeling in the communist sense. An editorial in Pravda called the April theses “unacceptable” and said that Lenin lost his sense of the actual situation in Russia during his long stay abroad. However, when it became apparent in the following weeks that the Provisional Government was weak and acted neither decisively with regard to land reform nor with regard to peace negotiations with Germany, support for Lenin's program grew among many who had initially considered it too radical.
Web links
- The April Theses (source text)
- GW Plekhanov on Lenin's April theses ( Memento from August 6, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
References
- ↑ after VI Lenin: Selected Works, Volume 3, p. 66.
- ↑ Douglas Smith: The Last Dance. The fall of the Russian aristocracy . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-077203-9 , p. 128 ff.
- ^ Robert Service : Comrades! A History of World Communism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge / Mass. 2007, ISBN 978-0-674-02530-1 , pp. 59 f.