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, when the only news reaching him was the "scanty information available in Switzerland" of the newspapers. Only the first of the letters 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. They were published on 7 April as The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution. This edition prints the Progress Publishers translations from the Collected Works — the Letters from Volume 23 (Moscow, first printing 1964, translated by M. S. Levin, the late Joe Fineberg and others) and The Tasks of the Proletariat from Volume 24 (1964). They are set here in the order they were written, letters first, so that the reader can watch the argument gather from a distance and then land.
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 — the soviets — 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 the same thought 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'" in the imperialist war; "No support for the Provisional Government"; and, against a return to parliamentarism, "not a parliamentary republic … but a republic of Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers' and Peasants' Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom."
The strongest thing in these pages is not the tactical audacity but the picture of the state Lenin wanted to build in place of the old one. It is already the vision he would elaborate that summer in The State and Revolution. "We need a state," he writes in the third letter. "But not the kind of state the bourgeoisie has created everywhere, from constitutional monarchies to the most democratic republics." In its place he sketches the model of the 1871 Paris Commune: a people's militia in arms rather than a standing army and police — "a people's militia, to which women must belong equally with men"; and, in the fifth thesis, the three demands that are the moral core of the whole document — "Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy," all officials "elective and displaceable at any time," and the salary of every official held to "the average wage of a competent worker." This is not a plan for a party to rule over the workers. It is a plan for the workers to govern themselves and to make the apparatus of government cheap, disarmed of coercive monopoly, and recallable at will.
It would be false to the tradition that reprints these texts to pass over their strains. Lenin himself is candid that the theses are provisional — "I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report." They were written at speed and bet everything on a wager that the whole document makes plain: that the Russian rising was the opening of a European and world revolution, and that a workers' Russia would not have to stand alone for long. That wager was reasonable in 1917 and it lost. The Commune model of the fifth thesis presupposes a confident, organised, and armed working class with the leisure to administer its own affairs; the country that actually tried to realise it was, within a year, blockaded, invaded on a dozen fronts, and stripped by civil war of the very proletariat in whose name the soviets spoke. The distance between the vision of the militia and the reality of the besieged garrison is not a flaw in the argument — it is the tragedy that overtook it.
That distance is exactly where this tradition insists on keeping its balance. The Bolsheviks of 1917 were not designing the state that came after them; they were reaching, in a collapsing country and a world war, for a way to keep the revolution from being handed back to the bourgeoisie under a democratic name. Lenin's "first stage … to its second stage" was, in all but the name, the permanent revolution Trotsky had argued for since 1905 — the recognition that in backward Russia the bourgeoisie could not carry through even its own revolution, so the proletariat would have to. On that point history vindicated them. The retreats and hard measures came later and under duress; nothing in these texts commands them, and much in them forbids them.
Was the state that made these pages holy faithful to them? It was their photographic negative, and that is the sharpest reason to read them now. The fifth thesis demanded the abolition of the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy; the Soviet state that canonised it built the largest standing army, the most powerful political police, and the most swollen bureaucracy of the age. It demanded officials elected, revocable, and paid a worker's wage; it produced a caste of unrecallable functionaries whose privileges were the organising fact of the society. The theses' call for "transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers' Deputies" — the demand soon shortened to the slogan All power to the Soviets — became, in the event, all power to the Party apparatus, and the soviets themselves were hollowed into a ceremony. Even the history of the texts was tidied to fit. The first Letter from Afar had been cut by Pravda's own editors before it could reach the workers; the theses, when Lenin brought them home, startled the Bolshevik leaders who had been backing the Provisional Government and drew an open rebuttal from Kamenev in the Party's own paper. The later canon smoothed all of this away, presenting a seamless, infallible Lenin whom the Party had followed as one — the better to license a Party that now demanded to be followed as one. The letters that had been suppressed for seven years were reprinted as scripture by the same institution whose forerunners had suppressed them.
So why read them today, against the grain of the cult that embalmed their author? Because the charter of workers' power from below that they lay out — the republic of soviets, the armed people, the official who earns a worker's wage and can be sacked by a show of hands — is the standard against which the bureaucratic state stands self-condemned. These are not the ancestors of the nomenklatura; they are its accusers. The April Theses, read as Lenin wrote them rather than as the catechism recited them, are not a blueprint for a party-state but the measure of how far that state departed from its own founding word. And their central intuition is still the live one: that a revolution which stops at the "democratic" stage managed by its propertied class has not been completed but arrested, and that the only guarantee against a new master is the self-government of the producers themselves. Lenin thought that guarantee lay in the soviets. History took the soviets away from the workers, and the state that resulted proved his point in the worst way. Returning these texts to their plain meaning is a way of returning the promise to the people it was made to.