On the Road to Insurrection/Preface
PREFACE TO ENGLISH EDITION
[We are indebted to the Editor of the Labour Monthly for permission to reprint the first portion of this book which appeared in the issues of that periodical.]
This book includes nearly everything written by Lenin between the Kornilov rising, in the late summer of 1917, and the revolution of November (October, old Russian calendar), except The State and Revolution,[1] the series of articles entitled For the Revision of the Party Programme, and a few other brief articles. All his writings dealing with the question of the insurrection are contained in On the Road to Insurrection, but one section, Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?, having already been published separately in English,[2] is omitted from the present translation.
Comrade Lenin wrote everything that is inserted in this collection after the "July days" when he was forced to flee from Kerensky's spies. First of all hidden in the suburbs of Petrograd, he lived for a time in a log cabin with a workman named Emelianov, then in a hut of branches in the depths of a forest; later, disguised as a locomotive fireman, he passed into Finland, where he found shelter at the home of a Finnish comrade, Rokis, formerly a workman in Petrograd. It was not until the end of September that Lenin succeeded in again re-entering Petrograd, where he stayed with a Bolshevik workman. And it was only on the eve of the insurrection that he could re-appear at Smolny.
These, then, were the circumstances in which Lenin never tired of explaining the coming armed clash of social forces, of exposing the Mensheviks' and Social-Revolutionaries' cowardly treachery, of pitilessly castigating any hesitation in the ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves, and of proving the inevitable necessity of the seizure of power. He himself was reduced to clandestine action and deprived of all immediate contact with the Party and the working masses, but that did not prevent him from appreciating, better than anyone else, the exact action called for by the political situation from day to day, and so making without any deviation towards the insurrection which concluded in the brilliant victory that autumn.
The problems that the Russian working class met with and, under the guidance of Lenin, solved during those months, are akin to the problems that the working class in every other country has also to prepare to face. Therein—and not in any mere academic interest such as history can never have for a class in bondage or struggling for power-lies the historical significance to the workers of all Lenin's writings, and this applies in a very special way to On the Road to Insurrection, for there exists no other complete or comparable work of day-to-day studies of the practical strategical problems of an immediately imminent proletarian revolution; and without such understanding as is here found of the actual struggle for power no Marxism or Socialism is genuine.