Letters from Afar and The April Theses

The texts gathered here were written across a single hinge of history: the six weeks in the spring of 1917 in which Lenin turned the Russian Revolution off the road its first leaders had chosen.

He wrote the five Letters from Afar in Zurich in March, in the first days after the tsar fell, working from the "scanty information available in Switzerland". Only the first reached Russia in time to be printed, and that with cuts made by the editors of Pravda, who found it too sharp; the rest were held back and did not see print until 1924. Then, at the start of April, Lenin crossed Germany in the sealed train, arrived at the Finland Station on the night of the 3rd, and the next day read out to a meeting of Social-Democrats the ten propositions the world would know as the April Theses.

What the two texts share is a refusal to let the revolution stop where it had arrived. February had put power in the hands of the liberal Provisional Government while the workers and soldiers built their own councils alongside it; most socialists, Bolsheviks included, treated this as the settled democratic stage and gave the new government conditional support. Lenin would have none of it. "The first revolution," he writes in the opening line of the first letter, is "but certainly not the last."

The theses put it as a formula that would echo for a century: Russia was "passing from the first stage of the revolution - which ... placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants". From that follow the famous injunctions: not the slightest concession to revolutionary defencism, no support for the Provisional Government, all power to the soviets, and officials elected, recallable and paid a worker's wage.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.