If, as my fellow Op-Edger John Wight stated recently, ‘seismic’ was the only word to describe 2016 – what on earth can we say about 1917? This was the year of not one, but two, Russian Revolutions.
It also saw the US break with isolationism and enter the First World War – and the Balfour declaration – which eventually led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
READ MORE: 2016: The year Washington lost its mind
The dramatic events of one hundred years ago still shape our world today. It’s important therefore that we relive the year and study it closely, as there’s much we can learn from it – and in particular from the year’s most influential personality.
If Donald Trump was the Person of the Year in 2016, there’s no doubting who the key figure in 1917 was: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. The bearded Marxist from Simbirsk began the year in exile, living with his wife in a bedsit at No 14 Spiegelgasse in Zurich, Switzerland, and ended it as the leader of the world’s first communist state.
After the February revolution, which saw Tsar Nicholas II abdicate and a Provisional Government take over in Petrograd, many who had been agitating for change thought it was a case of ‘Mission Accomplished’. But not Lenin. His return to his homeland in April was a historical game changer. “He called for immediate peace, immediate seizure of land by the peasantry, and immediate transfer of all power to the soviets,” records historian Christopher Hill, in his book ‘Lenin and the Russian Revolution.’
The bourgeois Provisional government, at first dominated by conservative and liberal members, broadened its base to include leftists, but fatally, it remained committed to participating in a capitalists’ war.
The Bolsheviks were proscribed in July and Lenin went into hiding once again. But when General Kornilov launched a counter-revolutionary coup attempt in August, the pro-war Prime Minister Kerensky was forced to rely on the support of the Bolshevik-dominated soviets to stay in power. The days of the Provisional Government were numbered, as popular support for the Bolsheviks surged. On October 25 (November 7 in the Gregorian calendar), Lenin and his comrades made their move.
Later, Lenin wrote about the significance of what had been achieved: “For hundreds of years states have been built on the bourgeois model, and now for the first time a non-bourgeois state has been discovered.”
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/372668-lenin-revolution-ussr-soviet/