Our Revolution

Lenin’s comments on the book Notes on the Revolution written by the Menshevik political commentator Nikolai Sukhanov. Since Lenin was ill the article was orally instructed on January 16-17, 1923, and was published in Pravda issue No. 117, May 30, 1923. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 33 of the first edition and the Vol. 43 of the second revised edition of the Complete Works of Lenin.

Is it in line with the law of Marxism and law of historical development to carry out socialist revolution in economically and culturally backward countries? This is a question that has been debated in the international communist movement. Among them, Sukhanov, a proponent of the Russian Menshevik faction wrote a book of seven volumes titled as “Notes on the Revolution” during 1918-1921, which included the history of Russia from February Revolution to October Revolution, spreading erred opinions which argued that the development level of productive forces in Russia doesn’t meet the conditions and requirements of socialist revolution and construction.

In December 1922, Lenin read Sukhanov’s Notes on the Revolution Vol. 3 and Vol. 4 during his illness. He insisted on dictating this article although his illness was severe in order to refute the fallacies in this work.

Lenin criticized the self-claimed Menshevik Marxists represented by Sukhanov saying: their conception of Marxism is impossibly pedantic. They have completely failed to understand anything critical and decisive in Marxism, that is, the core of it, i.e., the revolutionary dialectics. even from the purely theoretical point of view is their utter inability to grasp the following Marxist considerations: Up to now they have seen capitalism and bourgeois democracy in Western Europe follow a definite path of development, and cannot conceive that this path can be taken as a model only with certain amendments.

They can’t imagine making any modifications to this past path in West Europe. Their conduct betrays them as cowardly reformists who are afraid to deviate from the bourgeoisie, let alone break with it, at the same time they disguised their cowardice with the wildest rhetoric.

Lenin argued that the difference between him and Sukhanov is not a question of whether socialism needs a certain development level of productive forces. It is indisputable that Russia’s productive forces have not yet developed to a level where socialism can be implemented. But it should not be used as an excuse to deny the socialist revolution.

The socialist revolution and the realization of socialism are two problems that are related and different. According to Marxist revolutionary dialectics, the general law of the development of world history does not exclude the particularity in the form or order of development in individual development stages but takes this as the premise. The Russian revolution is different from the previous revolutions of Western European countries, showing certain particularities, which makes it possess the conditions of socialist revolution. In this case, Russia can reverse its historical order: first of all, Russia won the victory of the revolution, and used different methods from all other Western European countries to achieve the basic premise of building socialism, such as expelling landlords and capitalists, and then to create the economic and cultural level needed for building socialism on the basis of the workers’ and peasants’ political power and the Soviet system, so as to catch up other countries. Lenin predicted that the revolution in the eastern countries with huge population and complicated social conditions would undoubtedly seek innovations and would have more particularities than that in Russia, but these particularities would not change the general course of the world’s historical development.

In this article, Lenin, from the perspective of epistemology and methodology, strongly refuted the fallacy of Sukhanov and others who denied the Russian Revolution and socialist construction under the pretext that “Russia lacked of objective economic premise for the implementation of socialism”, and profoundly demonstrated the historical rationality of the path followed by the October Revolution, which has an important guiding significance for the socialist revolution and construction in the countries with relatively backward economy and culture.