Letter from Afar, Corrections from Up Close: The Bolshevik Consensus of March 1917

In early March 1917, immediately after the fall of the tsar, Lenin set down his reaction to the cataclysmic events in Russia in four Letters from Afar, using the skimpy news reports available to him in Switzerland. He hoped to publish these letters in the newly revived Pravda in Petrograd, but in the event, only the first of the four letters was published before Lenin himself arrived in early April.¹

According to a broad and unchallenged consensus among historians, the Petrograd Bolsheviks were scandalized by the views expressed in the four letters, owing to bold innovations that broke fundamentally with Old Bolshevism. Lenin’s audacity so flustered the editors of Pravda that they refused to published three of the Letters from Afar, and even the one letter that was published was heavily censored with cuts that disfigured its essential message. Alexander Rabinowitch speaks for the consensus in his explanation of why the Petrograd Bolsheviks were so upset. After Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin arrived on 13 March, he tells us, there was a “sharp turn to the right” in Pravda’s political line. After describing the pair’s “mild attitude” prior to Lenin’s arrival, Rabinowitch comments:

Obviously, this position contrasted sharply with the views expressed by Lenin in his “Letters from Afar,” and it is not surprising that Pravda published only the first of these and with numerous deletions at that. Among crucial phrases censored out was Lenin’s accusation that “those who advocate that the workers support the new government in the interests of the struggle against Tsarist reaction (as do the Potresovs, Gvozdevs, Chkhenkelis, and in spite of all his inclinations, even Chkheidze [all Mensheviks] are traitors to the workers, traitors to the cause of the proletariat, [and] the cause of freedom.” Lenin might have applied this accusation to Kamenev and Stalin as well.²

No wonder the Bolshevik leaders were so violently opposed to the even more radical April Theses! The episode of Lenin’s Letters from Afar thus feeds into a larger narrative of Bolshevism in 1917, one that emphasizes disruption and disunity. According to this account, Old Bolshevism is rendered irrelevant by the February Revolution, the Russian Bolsheviks flounder until Lenin returns home and rearms the party, and the party is subsequently divided over fundamental issues throughout the year. Party unity is restored—to the extent that it was restored—after the other leading Bolsheviks cave in to Lenin’s superior force of will. Only by these means was the party rearmed by a new strategy that proclaimed the socialist nature of the revolution and was therefore responsible for the Bolshevik victory in October. Nothing supports this reading of events more powerfully than the vivid anecdote of the flabbergasted and frightened Petrograd Bolsheviks censoring their own vozhd.

Despite the popularity of this anecdote, there has never been a systematic investigation in either Russia or the West of the cuts made by the Pravda editors. Indeed, since 1949, the Pravda text—the version read by people at the time, and thus of far greater historical importance than Lenin’s original draft—has essentially vanished from public view. In this case, an archival document has driven out of circulation a more significant published document. The immediate aim of the present case study is to fill this lacuna: to reestablish the Pravda text, to present the editorial modifications in a systematic manner, and to explain the apparent motivations of the editors.

As a result of my investigation, the Letter can no longer serve as a pillar of the standard narrative and becomes instead a strong challenge to it. The Pravda editors did not refuse to publish any of the Letters from Afar, since only the first one arrived in Petrograd in time.³ Far from being scandalized by the political message of Lenin’s Letter, the Petrograd Bolsheviks enthusiastically endorsed it.⁴ The changes made to his text had specific and limited aims: they were not meant to censor or deform his argument, nor did they have that effect. If anything, they improved...